Thesis Exhibition: February 26 - March 1, 2014

Opening Reception: Friday, February 28, 6 - 8:30pm

“ Interpreting the world is already a means of transforming it.”
–      Jacques Ranciére

My art practice begins with an interest in the metonymy of objects. With each project, I start with an object, a ball, a bed, clothes, and begin to unpack it, taking into consideration its symbolic and social function, its history in art and life, and, above all, its phenomenological affect. I want all of these dimensions of a thing to be present in my interpretation of it. Josef Albers based his pedagogy and his practice on the belief that perception is the meeting point of our assumptions and visible reality. I am interested in a third element informing our perception of the world, that of our body's relationship to it. The object that challenges our expectations of it, creates a space between what we thought we knew and what we see; it is an opportunity for meaning to be made and remade, imagined and reimagined. My work strives to create such a space of dissonance. Oppositions that are often involved in the work include seeing/feeling, surface/interior, self/other, image/living reality, and belonging/alienation.

Sculpture has gone through many transformations in the past century. In the 60's, the Minimalists erased the art object through its perfection as a harbinger of presence. Ten years later the Pictures Generation collapsed the object into image; all authority was located in the eye. Claes Oldenburg saw objects as an embodiment of the psychology of the everyday consumer, and the art object became our catharsis through his hand. My work operates somewhere amidst these three types of experience, as both object, image and part-object. The experience I pursue with each project is neither individual, nor social, but a phenomenological one that implicates both. It is neither here nor there, but about the codependency of both.