Artist’s Statement
Duet is a video installation that presents a “performance” of two domestic objects, a teapot and a spray bottle, to the tune of an iconic prelude on harpsichord by the late 17th-early 18th-century composer, Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre. Madame de La Guerre was one of the few female musicians/composers of her time to achieve notoriety, and famously performed in the court of Louis XIV. The silhouettes of the teapot and spray bottle serve as unconventional projection screens that host a fluid stream of video imagery depicting place, time, season, and everyday domestic routines. As containers for the video, the teapot and spray bottle at times appear animated, engaging each other in some kind of dance, and at times appear as peephole portals to other worlds. At the center of this video installation lies the tension of balance and imbalance of formal and informal elements, interior and exterior spaces, narrative structure and non-narrative compositions, and humdrum domestic routines and the irregular pace of the natural world.
As an installation artist, I am delighted to exhibit Duet in the context of a natural history museum. I welcome the scientific lens that the L.C. Bates Museum will bring to this artwork, and embrace the play on “the habitat,” both natural and unnatural, intrinsic and invasive, as it pertains to the environment and to the human psyche.
Clothesline is an installation of large, floppy photographic vinyl-printed cut-outs hung by clothespins as if out to dry on a clothesline. The collection of the objects on the line, such as: a toothbrush, diapers, drips of macaroni and cheese, wildflowers, a water pistol, plastic zip-lock bags, a toddler, converse sneakers, an over-ripe banana, a hammer, headphones, a razor, deodorant, milkweed pods, songbird, maraschino cherry, kitchen gloves, jeans, mismatched socks and underwear, a pair of scissors, a prescription medicine bottle, an earthworm, a stained cloth napkin and/or duct tape presents a non-narrative cross-section of items that exist in the grind of everyday life. The objects on the clothesline exist as remnants of an unknown person or event. Color and form visually connect natural and man-made items. For example, the deep maze yellow of a Black-eyed Susan flower petal blends into the well-known hue of Kraft mac’n cheese. The droopy material nature of the vinyl playfully contrasts the structure and stature of the chosen objects, making them appear limp and vulnerable, like shadows or ghosts of the objects that are being represented.
The theme of In Balance/Imbalance is explored through the selection of items on the clothesline, and their intended use or cultural meaning. The toiletries, such as the razor and deodorant, for example, are man-made tools designed to erase the more animal features of our primate selves: odor and body hair, while the water pistol is an object that conflates child’s play and violence, physically squirting water (the substance of life) while gesturing an intention to kill.
The Grandma series navigates the foggy balance between absence and presence in the context of video chat and social technologies. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified this space through prolonged experiences of social distancing, travel restrictions, and isolation. In this series, a four-year-old child grasps a paper cut-out printed from a video chat screen-capture of his grandmother’s hand. The series explores balance and imbalance between the realms of virtual and “IRL” social spaces. How do remote social technologies shrink and swell the experience of distance over time? In what ways do relationships change and evolve when we can’t touch each other, or make direct eye contact?