February 20 - April 6
First Friday Receptions: March 1 & April 5
Artist statement:
“My mixed media sculpture, video, and two-dimensional work uses humor to play with issues of power, and complicity. It highlights trade-offs of power—some willing, others coerced— suggesting a complicity that reveals our conflicted relationship to power. The work revels in a material frivolity fueled by kitsch material choices that belie the depth of content. With a wide range of influences from art to gender politics, I use humor to explore culture.
Formally, the work moves between two and three dimensions as it investigates the slippage between the real and the fictive. For example, a kitschy airbrushed portrait on a carved form orb confuses the dimensionality of Mike Kelley’s face in Portrait of an Artist as a Dead Man, while stickers of wood chips make a paper-mâché form appear to be carved from strandboard in Paradise Redux. My often-kitsch material choices indulge a self-conscious surface silliness that invites a multi-layered reading of my work. Carved foam, welded steel, airbrushed portraits, and latch-hook rugs are all worthy carriers of deeper meaning.”
About her Cube exhibit:
“For my Cube exhibit I have developed a project I began at the Wassaic Project in New York. The work included observing local goats in the creation of a video and emerged from a Fulbright Nehru grant period spent in India. While observing the goats in India, I was taken by the ability to rise above--quite literally. For Cube, I will create a multi-channel video and sculptural installation featuring footage of a piñata party I hosted for several goats in Wassaic. The party featured a goat-shaped piñata made entirely from vegetables and an Olympic medal style stand. The installation will feature a large-scale version of the stand, the sides of which will function as video screens, as the form itself acts as a monolith dedicated to achievement. The space surrounding it will be decorated with medallions and sculptures made of carnations. The carnation pieces conflate the tokens we get for winning with those we get in death. The carnations will be allowed to dry out and ultimately die through the exhibition, furthering the arc of the works experience.”
