Installation
Throughout my practice, I engage with embodied understanding rather than illustrative composition. Often, this leads me to installations that envelope the audience within sensory components designed to deepen physical resonance. Though visually quite different, these works are unified by active, tangible transformation. As the installations change in response to presence, they begin to tell a story through the senses.
but for your presence, 2023
A site-specific, interactive installation of glass, steel, water, salt, and text that considers the vulnerability of engaging with trauma and the precarity of connection. Increasing levels of human engagement culminate in the spilling of water and message-filled glass vessels onto steel, creating a rust drawing. In this way, presence and intimacy accumulates to permanently alter the environment.
Why I/You, 2023
A variable installation of rust-printed books that utilizes the fugitivity of an unfixed surface to make engagement visible. As the pages are turned to piece together the trauma-based narrative hidden within the redacted text, the readers fingers will leave traces of rust from the cover, a tangible echo of their presence upon the book. In engaging with Why/I You, the audience will literally take a bit of their experience away, with or without the object itself.
Of Precarity and Release, 2022
An interactive floor installation that utilizes pressure and presence to explore power dynamics, connection, and the release that comes from vulnerability in connection.
Why (for your eyes), 2022
A site-specific text and video installation that explores the contradictory power and self-silencing inherent in the selective disclosure of one's own history of domestic violence. Exploring the myriad ways that a woman may feel she is breaking feminine behavioral taboos, the installation surrounds the viewer in selectively redacted versions of each "Why" that I have regarding my own abusive relationship. At the opening of this enclosure, facing outward, is a confrontational silenced video recitation of my questions in full. The video serves as a further refusal to disclose the story, while insisting upon the visibility of the feelings writ large upon my face.
and to What End?, 2022
A durational action wherein I traced hundreds of questions relating to my own experience in an abusive relationship onto the wall while never leaving a space the width of my stance. By limiting the reach of my questioning to the extent of my own body, I considered the distorted, inscrutable nature of accumulating repetitive thoughts that are never spoken aloud. After the 9.5 hour durational action, the words and writing implements remained. In its final form these items were folded into a projected video of the inscription process, flattening time and imagining my body back into the space on an endless loop.
Placid Facade, 2022
A sound, image, and sculpture installation that documents my trip to 42 locations in Philadelphia that were the site of reported Domestic Violence Incidences in 2021, the most deadly year on record for intimate partner abuse in the city. Each image is an anonymized view from the street of the reported locations, where I recorded the mundane sounds of existence at the reported time. The stereo playback of two audio compilations bring the viewer into the sensations of each supposedly remarkable space, contemplating the impossibility of spotting an abusive home from the outside. In the middle of the installation sits a sprouted calendula seed, which signifies time and healing, and which I planted at each location as a silent witness and companion for those who may yet be troubled there, and for those who are there no longer, for good or ill.
Surrounded by What Might Have Been, Should Have Been, Never Was, 2021
An multimedia installation that utilized broken safety glass, and projected video to explore the shattering of childhood idealizations and the lingering aftereffects of its inevitablility.
Manipulate Me, 2021
An interactive installation in which the audience is invited to utilize specialized tools made of glass to experiment with the projected image, which is situated within a frame on the opposite wall. Within the darkened space, it is possible to project the artist around the space, distorting her placid visage and placing the manipulator's actions on display for those who stand within view. Agency, responsibility, permission, and intent are called into question by this work, though its experience is pleasurable, which deepens the exploration of awareness in power dynamics.