Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Grandfather Project (2009)
In The Grandfather Project, the fiber installation uses poetry that my late grandfather wrote about his experiences in the Great Depression, WWII and his career as a state trooper. I also use photos, both personal and historical. The piece looks like laundry drying, playing on the idiom of "Don't air your dirty laundry." I am revealing secrets, secrets about my grandfather and about myself, secrets that I have ambiguous feelings about.
I am interested in exploring the body through fabric. I create skin bruises and scars and use the colors of blood as a way of exploring how memories can leave traces, how experiences can penetrate.
I cannot fully understand my grandfather’s experiences. In stitching the pieces together and by obstructing his poetry with images from my imagination and popular culture, I want to convey the difficulty of understanding different generations. What are the things that get in the way when we construct the past from other's recollections?
Wavering Testimony (2008)
Multimedia silk screened fibers: Rayon, silk organza, linen, cotton, velvet, thickened MX reactive dyes, water base ink, cotton thread, latex paint, sewing needles , 126”x225” & 126”x94”, 2008
Shown at the Macalester College Art Gallery, Senior Show
Multimedia silk screened fibers: Rayon, linen, velvet, thickened MX reactive dyes, sewing needles , 56 1/2”x58. 1/2”x3”, 2008
water based ink and latex paint, 8”x12”, 2008
Multimedia silk screened fibers: Rayon, silk organza, thickened MX reactive dye, 51 1/2”x45”x3, 2008
Multimedia silk screened fibers: Rayon, silk organza, thickened MX reactive dye, 51 1/2”x45”x3, 2008
Multimedia silk screened fibers: Rayon, silk organza, MX reactive dye, 72”x44”x3”, 2008.
My art explores cultural and personal history and memory, and how these intertwine. I use archival material, mostly family photos, to create specific references that in turn, serve as points of departure for printmaking and fiber processes. The use of archival materials and photographs allow me to examine a wide range of issues including the nature of memory and time, the human body, historiography, and personal and family relationships.
The series Wavering Testimony, was about how family artifacts- photos, diaries, heirlooms, stories- interact with our memories and how they can create or reproduce relationships. How do we access our past and how is that entrance, whether through a memory, a well-known story- or a photograph, change our destination? What purpose do these artifacts serve and how are these purposes created?
Wavering Testimony was organized to resemble private things on public display. The large pieces could be laundry hanging, or evidence dissected for museum displays (the multi layered fiber pieces were pinned to the walls with sowing needles), though the information next to them on the wall was never clear or complete. The display blurs the boundaries between clinical inquiry and personal searching,
My family and its history is an inspiration because though it is familiar there are endless hidden stories. These stories that I have found either through research, conversations or my own memories, allow for questions regarding family and relationships and also larger ideas and contexts. Whether reading a book about Vienna pre 1938 or talking with my grandmother about her German parents or watching a PBS series on the nature of time, I take these experiences and try to discover or make connections between them through art. My art then becomes a process that allows me to analyze, confront and sometimes challenge the past, and how we transform it into history.