June 22 - August 5, 201
First Friday Receptions: July 1 & August 5, 6-10p
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores the way in which power and influence affect the body in politics, history, and mass media. I juxtapose items of cultural significance with abstracted forms in order to reveal the esoteric nature of patriarchal / imperial power as a mechanism for social control disguised as entertainment, nostalgia, or governance. I employ abstraction as a means to make visually concrete the function of influence itself on the body. The complex / abstruse power systems imbedded in culture provide the fodder for the forms I create. I intend to expose, subvert, and play with the idea of power itself. This installation specifically addresses North Carolina’s relationship to these concepts through legislative language.
North Carolina’s continuing record of passing legislation that limits civil rights within the state has effectively obstructed women’s rights and voter’s rights. Recently, the passing of HB2 has created laws intended to oppress LGBTQ persons, and also unjustly misrepresents workers within the state. The state legislature’s inclination is to disguise a bill as having one purpose, when in actuality it effectively has a much broader and damaging scope as reflected in HB 353, passed in 2013. This bill attached women’s health care issues to a motorcycle safety act at the 11th hour, and is a deceitful and underhanded action at best. HB 589 limits voter’s rights and impacts the most disadvantaged in the state under the guise of “voter confidence” in fear of “voter fraud”, an almost non-existent problem in the state of North Carolina. The camouflaging of true intent inherent in these bills reflects the complex nature of a power system rooted in fear of the other. It also reveals the reduction of people to statistics in order to publically control and legislate our identities.
In this installation, these bills and others take shape as disassembled, disemboweled, and mutilated forms that aim to expose the reduction of humans into biological and physiological terms within the language of legislation. Color, sound and fog create a distraction / diversion, much in the way systems of repressive power appear as forms of entertainment, or, as in this case, in the language of legislation.