Shooting Stars, Reining Rainbows (2009)

The piece Shooting Stars, Reining Rainbows, uses found passages and images from a U.S Western History book published in the 1970s. Both the images and passages have been changed. The passages have been taken out of context and the images have been altered. The wood engraving and letterpress work is a satire on the United State’s past and present consumption of the environment.

Family Trees (2009)

Family Trees (Detail)

Family Trees

Family Trees (2009)

Family Trees (Intaglio, silkscreen, acrylic ink) explores how photographs do not have a fixed meaning and what family photographs can reveal and hide. 

Placements 2009

Placements, in tradition of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, uses the dinner table and placements as a way to discuss the roles of women in history. But Placements, unlike The Dinner Party, focuses on the women in my family; my ancestors, my two grandmothers, my mother, and myself.

Placements explores not only how identity is constructed and layered, but, like your seating at a dinner party, the things that seem to have been decided without you. 

Also playing off the familiar experience of being seated at "the kid's table" I placed my dinner placement on a smaller table. The images I used for the other women involved mostly marriage and children, two milestones I have not experienced. By placing myself apart, I am questioning not only my status as an "adult woman" but the path to reach it.

It was important that I build the two tables because found objects carry their own meaning. The words on the table ( passages from the bible, quotes from books, news announcements) and the faint numbers on the wall represent for me the ways we organize our lives, through pictures, words and numbers. These allow us to place ourselves, in time and among people. 

Enoch Technology (2009)

This was another experiment at Art Farm. I created a fake piece of antique technology hoping to inspire people to write messages to other people on this planet. Mostly they just drew things. 

Old Silo top, latex paint, chalk, plaque design by Kelly Seacrest, plaque constructed by Awards Unlimited, 2009

Experimentation with site

Here are just some experimentations with site I completed during the summer of 2009 at Art Farm in Nebraska. 

The Grandfather Project (2009)

Installation View

(Click on Images to Enlarge)

Mulitmedia silk screened fibers: Rayon, silk organza, thickened MX reactive dyes, thickened Earthue Dyes, cotton thread, latex paint, kite string

Above: Detail

Above: Detail

Above: Detail

Above: Detail

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Above: Detail

Above: Detail

Above: Detail

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?