STATEMENT The stories we are told and the ways that they affect us are more complex than we often realize. Through layered processes of de/reconstruction of found and manipulated imagery and objects, I construct new, strange systems for understanding and relating to the familiar. With works that mobilize print media and manipulate spaces, I investigate the modes by which knowledge is produced and identities are constructed. By reconfiguring tropes of the Science Fiction genre, where the present is mediated by an imagined, distant realm, this body of work seeks to render the certainty of time, space, and truth up for discussion by positioning the viewer as a visitor to alternative scopes of reality.
My practice examines what I describe as “Gendered Machines:” any non-human, mechanical objects that are associated with, signifiers of, or explicitly assigned a gender, a term also reflective of the culturally constructed mechanisms by which such categorizations guide the ways we chose or are allowed to identify. Through intensive research processes concerned with understanding how this phenomenon manifests in both lived and fictional realities, a typical polarization is revealed in these relationships. Codification that reflects limited understandings of gender identity is imposed onto the objects that people create, use, and identify with, where things are generally understood to be either objects of service or of domination. This is a patriarchal oversimplification that my work seeks to complicate by offering disruptive modes of gender representation that generate visions of possibility.
