Advanced Fiber Studio (Highlights)
Through playful endeavors, I reference game or event settings, pulling from many different references and associations such as parties or the game of pick-up sticks. In my piece Off Course, I staged formal sculptures resembling mini golf bumpers in a hallway, forcing people to contend with the objects in space but denying them the chance to utilize the sculptures as a real course. Subverting any preconceived expectations or contexts for the work, I pose objects as potential interactive elements, but they do not serve a purpose in becoming an actual party or game. My work exists in a state of flux; impermanent installations, unattached modules or props, and precarious constructions all embody an ephemerality like holiday decorations that are meant to be put up and taken down each season. Working intuitively and provisionally to accumulate large amounts of material, I assemble wimpy structures or objects as grand, or outrageous installations.
Employing a visual language of chaotic pattern and bright colors such as neons, my work is highly saturated in appearance. Shiny, plastic, wacky materials such as silly putty are a starting point for associations but become transformed through my process of making. Utilizing print as a material, I apply it to as many surfaces as I can, making the work more visually stimulating, Sometimes my prints expose an artifice, standing in as a mere representation of the image they display; I placed printed images of goldfish in plastic bags to represent the live prized goldfish, and I also stuck prints of stanchion poles on the walls with which I attached physical stanchion ropes to. Playing with the boundaries of space while responding to spaces around me, I am interested in ways to delineate space and occupy it. Play is essential to my practice; through the system of the game, I am able to engage in play—in my intuitive process of assembling materials—and control play in the viewer, by challenging or ignoring the rules of the game and inventing my own in the form of a nonfunctional sculpture or installation.