CLOSE CONTACT - group thesis show, Pomona College, 2023
STATEMENT: In this work there is no meaningful distinction between the imagined and the real. The pieces talk about mythologies in the same way they speak about the gesture of a hand, or the sensation of food moving through your digestive tract. They allow for the proximity of things: the visceral and the Erotic, physical and metaphysical, pleasure and pain.
The materials I work with remind me of the physical experience of being. The watercolor paint is like my bodily fluids, while wool is a fiber not so different from my own hair. I pour paint onto the paper with force and it splatters in undesirable places, reminding me of a jet of urine splashing against the ground and onto my shoe. Piss, blood, saliva, cum: unwieldy things made wieldy. I root wool into the surface, changing the object, allowing paper to become skin.
The material story becomes a statement about the primacy of physicality. It seems to me that if I have access to higher/deeper forms of knowing/being, it is because of my clitoris, my hands, my belly, not despite them. What emerges is a formal treatment of the body that has more to do with having/being/knowing one, rather than depicting one.
My arms extend around and in, fingers grasping at an unexpected organ. I give my fluorescent stomach a good squeeze, like a hug.
