When I think of art and what I might do to practice it, I think first of dreams and then of catharsis. My ideas might come from a dream and the doing of the artwork would provide my long longed for catharsis. Isn’t that what we all wish for? When I dream, I often dream about whales or that I am a man or animal bodied. These dreams might refer me to an interest in the hugeness of self that lies below the quiet surface of any human being. Or they might be about a sense of transformation; that by becoming something else- another gender or animal- we might finally come to an understanding of our past and ourselves. My work is driven by the need to understand that shock of reality and experience that causes one’s childhood to end and adulthood to begin. Stranded, beached, submerged, flooded, tornado-caught, violated, wounded, starved, buried, hobbled; what was your moment?
My work has become more and more personal these past years. During my first year at Penn, I was mostly involved with the investigation of surface and believability in photography. With the start point of “disaster,” I set up events in my studio made up of model houses that I built. I enjoyed the longer process of making a photograph and the amount of time it gave to me to construct an image. As the project progressed, though, I became dissatisfied with the limitations of the miniature and studio-containment. I wanted to be able to get to the heart of what I was actually trying to make work about.
I found a new way of getting at my subject when I started taking surveillance footage of my parent’s backyard in South Carolina. I caught nighttime animals on tape, and it was something about the unaware vulnerability of their bodies and the delay of the night vision camera that sparked new ideas for me. I feel that it is not entirely important for me to fully understand what it is in those videos that inspired me, but it is important for me to hold onto the sense of possibility and dreaminess that they made me experience. I began to sense an interest in what is unseen or unacknowledged. What exists in our life that remains beneath the surface? What are we not supposed to see? What are we most afraid of revealing to others? What is shameful?
I have finally started to be more plainspoken in my work. I am using my own body in my work rather than using stand-ins for myself. I have shifted from still photography to animation and video in order to make work that is experienced in a more bodily, visceral way.
The first animations I have made involve a model body that I constructed from fabric and stuffing in order to layer over mine. My body beneath the model moves it, but I am protected in a sense by its material corporeality. In this project, I am seeking to express spot lit moments of my memory of a traumatic event from my childhood. I am looking at all of the ways it has followed me into my present life. There is no separation between past and present. What I make has been running on a loop in my head for more than a decade, and I am finally starting the cathartic process of making it visible. My work in this sense is about the struggle between articulating how little I consciously know about myself and the knowingness of my body which sees all.
My work has become more and more personal these past years. During my first year at Penn, I was mostly involved with the investigation of surface and believability in photography. With the start point of “disaster,” I set up events in my studio made up of model houses that I built. I enjoyed the longer process of making a photograph and the amount of time it gave to me to construct an image. As the project progressed, though, I became dissatisfied with the limitations of the miniature and studio-containment. I wanted to be able to get to the heart of what I was actually trying to make work about.
I found a new way of getting at my subject when I started taking surveillance footage of my parent’s backyard in South Carolina. I caught nighttime animals on tape, and it was something about the unaware vulnerability of their bodies and the delay of the night vision camera that sparked new ideas for me. I feel that it is not entirely important for me to fully understand what it is in those videos that inspired me, but it is important for me to hold onto the sense of possibility and dreaminess that they made me experience. I began to sense an interest in what is unseen or unacknowledged. What exists in our life that remains beneath the surface? What are we not supposed to see? What are we most afraid of revealing to others? What is shameful?
I have finally started to be more plainspoken in my work. I am using my own body in my work rather than using stand-ins for myself. I have shifted from still photography to animation and video in order to make work that is experienced in a more bodily, visceral way.
The first animations I have made involve a model body that I constructed from fabric and stuffing in order to layer over mine. My body beneath the model moves it, but I am protected in a sense by its material corporeality. In this project, I am seeking to express spot lit moments of my memory of a traumatic event from my childhood. I am looking at all of the ways it has followed me into my present life. There is no separation between past and present. What I make has been running on a loop in my head for more than a decade, and I am finally starting the cathartic process of making it visible. My work in this sense is about the struggle between articulating how little I consciously know about myself and the knowingness of my body which sees all.
