“small dilemmas”, 2020 [mixed media, hand embroidery on aida cloth]
senior studio art independent project
virtual exhibition page
_a note:
throughout the 2019-2020 academic school year, I have been working on an art installation meant to bring historic modes of domestic surveillance placed on women and bring them to the modern day by creating embroidery works as well as furniture creation. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my work was cut short as students had to leave campus in March. While I was heartbroken, I changed directions within my project and work with the materials I was able to take with me in order to finish my project while still maintaining its original vision, which meant focusing completely on hand embroidery and forging on without finishing my furniture. Our class had to rise above lots of challenges - not only was the senior year we envisioned was going to be spent apart from the campus that we loved so dearly, we were going to be apart and away from the resources and physical community that helped us foster our work.
_statement:
I am continually studying the ways technology impacts society through different mediums. As a project-based artist, I explore areas of surveillance, the body, and identities using methods that generate curiosity. I attempt to give tangible bodies disparate relations of theories that predate me and my ideas, and bring them to the present. Studying how the body works under both digital and physical modes of surveillance, I observe tactility and interfaces and how they affect our precarious experience with reality as we figure out what it means to live, to work, and to think.
_project:
This body of work has been informed by traditional domestic crafting methods and media theories on surveillance. I use the production strategies of traditionally gendered crafts with the formal characteristics of old and new surveillance technologies to give tangible bodies to my ideas on information gathering. I cross stitch a pixelated human ear in the colors of grey and green, intertwining the tactile to the digital, paired with a disembodied, abstracted face. I choose the traditionally female domestic crafting techniques of household economies of the 18th-20th centuries to materialize images of contemporary surveillance and data collection, bridging times and exposing modes of control in the present. Within this time of crisis, I am especially focusing on methods of mobility, equity, and repetitive (meditative) processes.
Surveillance has taken a much greater meaning in this time of crisis: instances of mass contact tracing, counting bodies within a public space, patients in a hospital, authorities stressing people to stay at home. In this new domestic reality I am cross-stitching meaning, subversion and new realities.
...and this is just a beginning.
