Perpetual Frontier, 2019
5'x6' Screenprinted textile, straight pins

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Map of the Perpetual Frontier, 2019
Screen print collage on sheer voile fabric, plexiglass, steel, wood, 60” x 60” x 3”
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Suspended in layered panels, this piece engages a material manufactured by my own hand, designed for mediation across multiple incarnations. The Perpetual Frontier Textile set features a collage of found, manipulated, and illustrated imagery, patterned over transparent material. Extending the material’s treatment within its previous form, stitched into the continuous loops that are worn by the ​Rocket with Hoopskirt, the layers of overlapping iconography offer alternative perspectives, disrupting the certainty of linear time. In a perpetual representation of territory, who's frontier is in an impossibly constant state of extension, this textile reflects fantasies of limitless expansion. In this way, scientific means of imposing apparatuses of control such as space travel or the project of mapping itself are aligned with attitudes of Manifest Destiny, deserved inter-global dominance that continues to enframe land through imaginary visions of unending opportunity for conquest. Historically gendered labor, exploitation of natural environments, as well as the direct influences of the past on the imagined future are embedded in the fibers worn by the rocket’s implied figure. By laying the same material flat, baring a conflated selection of its information, which mimic classroom maps but deny viewer manipulation, this piece critiques institutional processes of conducting education.