Body Language is a sculptural, multimedia installation and exploration invested in helping chronic pain sufferers and non-sufferers alike to view pain as physical, legitimate, and profoundly important. Pain is a quintessentially private sensation, experience, or emotion. It depends on social action to make it tangible. The exhibition investigates the ways in which the experience of chronic pain is simultaneously sensation and emotion, emphasizing the connection between language and pain: the notion that a pain sufferer speaks a language of a world different from the everyday-world.
Body Language: Ghost in the Machine
Tug of War was my undergraduate thesis show at Virginia Tech in 2009. The conceptually charged sculptures explored questions of beauty, power, perfection and consumption and how these affect the human body. By combining my own body and media with everyday materials such as food wrappers, kitchen utensils, or cosmetic products, I revealed the overwhelming pressures of pursuing and upholding contemporary society's concepts of beauty and its expectations of unattainable perfection. I challenged myself to balance process and concept creating figurative yet abstract, elegant yet disturbing works which further address the constant struggle for moderation and balance in our nutritional intake or lack thereof.
A compilation of unedited images created with projections on my body. This was part of a larger project where I created a daily visual food log of what I consumed and later projected those images onto me.
The audio was created from physical prints of my eyelashes that I transformed into “sound waves.”
Through my work, I transmit memories that evoke the physical awareness of place and culture. I confront one’s body and the relationship of the interior and the exterior, and for me, the anxiety of self-perfection. I find this connection fascinating because the topic is interpreted differently from male to female and culture-to-culture. Even though my work often contains me as the primary subject, the audience can make their own connection based on the visuals that I’ve constructed.
My aesthetic is a platform that conveys the message of the anxiety that body image and perfection can bring upon a person. Where certain emotions that derive from body image desire the gaze to be averted, I confront directly by using dramatically close up shots and bringing us down to the surface- the skin.
The first experimental performance in a series of three as part of a Performance Art course in graduate school at Columbia College Chicago.
This multi-media installation was originally created for LOCUS IX: LOCUS is a quarterly gallery show and micro-grant program combining visual & literary artists in an anonymous pairing creative conversation. At The Martin, on December 10, 2021, the result of the anonymous creation for twelve pairings, where artists met each other for the first time and shared more about their process in an artist talk led by LOCUS Founder & Curator, Whitney LaMora.
The works in this installation are composed of double exposed images of my face and images I photograph on walks as part of my artist walking practice. In addition, the miniature sculptures are created from paint chips collected off of various exterior structures on my walks combined with more double exposed images of my faced combined with my grandmother's face.
This project has been developing for several years since my introduction to the book Arte Agora: Art Made, Sold, or Placed in a Public Way, by Dan X. O’Neil. Early in the pandemic, I began walking many miles each day, observing and documenting the conversations of the walls of the streets of Chicago, which are ever-changing organisms that seem to go unnoticed by the majority of the public. I soon decided that I wanted to be part of this public art conversation, and so my walking artist practice began.
Through my work, I can be a part of the fabric of the walls and buildings all around you while hiding in plain sight. I am acutely aware of the space I take up, or don’t take up, and even apologize for taking up, and am appalled to know how many other women do the same. I think about the constant marginalization and objectification of women and their bodies, and how I can be truly seen beyond my appearance alone. How can I possibly alter one’s perception of what a woman and even an artist “should'' look like? On social media, how can this work challenge the definitions of visibility? Ultimately, I want my work to exemplify both hearing and speaking, and I hope it encourages viewers to look, listen, and to use their own voices in this on-going conversation.
See more of my work in the latest book by Dan X. O’Neil and Shawn-Laree O’Neil, Spots, Forms & Methods in Arte Agora: The Where, What, and How of a Modern Art Movement.
