Within and Without, Installation

In mid-February, when there was only a single confirmed case of coronavirus in Los Angeles, a 16-year-old student was accused by another student of bringing the virus into his school from China. When he replied that he wasn’t Chinese, his classmate punched him in the head 20 times. He ended up in the emergency room.

This piece is about my own journey of self-discovery and navigating what it means to be an artist. The boats voyage around the white cube, interacting with the space and other artists’ pieces in it. The projection is footage of the scenic beauties of Oberlin that we often pass by. I wanted to return to a childlike perspective of attention, sensitivity, affection, amusement, and curiosity about the environment. In order to do so, I used the camera as an extension of myself. The audience is welcome to walk around the space and become part of the piece by adding origami boats. As the piece grows, the artist grows through interaction with the inspiring minds here at Oberlin.

Color of Love. Acrylic paint on wood.

Untitled (3). 2020. Gausses, gesso, balloon, and tulle.
Untitled (4). 2020.  Gausses, gesso, balloon, tree branch, and leaves.
Untitled (5). 2020.  Cardboard, gesso, glue gun, white paint, and tree branches.

Aversion, and Purity. Assemblage

In the process of creating this piece, I experimented with different monotype techniques, including printing found objects, printing ghost prints with small changes to the previous plate, and transferring digital printer images onto rice paper for Chine-colle.

1. Walking home from the concert, she hears her boots squeak. This is represented by the Chine-colle Muybridge series at the base of the top image. 
2. She decides to create the absurd invention that she is depicted wearing. This corresponds to the abstracted boots around her ears.
3. She decides to try the boot-earphones with a couple of her favorite records. This is represented by the record player above her head.

1. Walking home from the concert, she hears her boots squeak. This is represented by the Chine-colle Muybridge series at the base of the top image. 
2. She decides to create the absurd invention that she is depicted wearing. This corresponds to the abstracted boots around her ears.
3. She decides to try the boot-earphones with a couple of her favorite records. This is represented by the record player above her head.

This print depicts my experience of becoming twisted around myself as I spent more and more time alone in the same space. Thoughts focusing more and more internally and perspective beginning to narrow. By placing the chair in the front corner, I intended to express an absence as well as a sense of space and home. That space has a few connection points between a private and public reality, the windows existing as the main connection with the outside world. The patterns surrounding the corners of the windows were intended to contain a sense of time and disorder, like lead paint slowly deteriorating and chipping away.

Twister for One. 1/12. 2020. woodblock reduction. 16’x16’.

This piece began with a photoshop collage using archival images of eggs, wood, and other organic materials. This was then translated into a laser cut matrix, which I used to print the black image. As I was working on this project, I was also animating collage imagery in stop motion. That process began leaking into the imagery of this print: the hands manipulating and interacting with the organic materials. This print also appears a bit like a frozen frame in an ongoing sequence, and I wanted to play with that idea further with my second block, a jigsaw which I used to print the three colors. With this second laser cut block, I drew inspiration from early color films, hand-painted frame by frame in ways that the color elements would sometimes separate from the black and white image. The tags of text contained in the print do not have any direct meaning, but are my way of drawing a connection back to the source material.

Nesting. 13/13. 2020. Laser cut woodblocks. 18’x12.25’.

My nest book is a self-portrait. Making it was an effort to find home within myself, my space, and my family. I look to color and texture for solace, and find comfort in relational aesthetics such as plaid and weaving, which I associate with my grandmothers. Working with such irregular materials is a way of healing in regards to my relationship to the spaces I inhabit. By fusing layers of transparent plastic bags, fruit sacks, and fishing rope, I composed images that represent the sometimes indecipherable layering of identity. I repeated images of nests to replicate the iterative nature of continually forming a resting place. Leaving this piece unbound and untrimmed was both a deliberate and inevitable expression of my process, highlighting the raw quality of the recycled materials I work with, and of my grappling with a sense of home.