2003 Installation at Spark Contemporary Gallery

“Feminizing Technology” is an exploration of the antithetical pairing of technology (labeled masculine) and domesticity (labeled feminine). Sewing, embroidery and needlework are common signifiers in feminist art, as well as signifiers of my own matrilineage. My grandmother sews, knits, embroiders, etc. and has complimented her traditional skills with a digitalized sewing machine that can be programmed and used with a computer. Seeing her interest and dependence on technology and the juxtaposition of old and new has provoked me to discover many similarities quilted and stitched work have with digital, pixel based work. Each step of the way I discover how the traditions of the past continue to influence and interact with the formation of traditions of the present. Immersing myself in both the quilting and programming experiences, I hope to reveal an equilibrium of a “genderless” activity.

Trading Card - "G"

2005. Brochure.

“Comfortable Space” was a collaborative research project with three undergraduate students, one graduate student (me) and the LGBT Resource Center at Syracuse University. The project was facilitated through the Boundaries in Syracuse course taught by Lori Brown & Alison Mountz. The main focus of the research was on how the university LGBT community defines comfortable space.

There were two large outcomes of this project. First there was a close examination of hetero-normative spaces on campus, particularly bathrooms. A number of students are not perceived as belonging to the gender dichotomy of male and female, therefore a directory of single stall bathrooms, along with specific details about safety and the current labeling of the bathrooms was compiled. That compilation is available as a webpage off of the SU LGBT Resource Center website and as a printed brochure.The project also included installation at Company Gallery that looks at comfortable and uncomfortable space through physical space, video, audio and maps.

A set of 6 “trading cards” that point out hetero-normative space and the many locations and spatial situations heterosexuals take for granted. These cards are used as a way to initiate the conversation outside of the installation, or as a continuation of the installation.

Stalled Decisions article about the project in the Daily Orange

Students continue to lobby for gender-neutral spaces.  A 2009 report in the Daily Orange indicates that the University plans to build at least one gender-neutral single-stall bathroom in each building.

2005. Trading Cards

2005. Installation @ Company Gallery

“Do You Know Her?” is an exploration of “female archetypes” that appear in women centered magazines from the 1930s to the present. The semiotics that surround advertisements marketed towards women include: home appliances, detergents, beauty products, personal hygiene products, feminine hygiene products, grocery items, children, household products, wedding rings, pots & pans, and lingerie. The advertisements, originating in printed magazines, layered onto the mannequin, and then onto the window, demonstrates the layered marketing techniques the media/companies use to promote ideas of “ideal womanhood.”

2005. Installation @ Company Gallery

The mannequin acts as an instrument of extraction, to emphasize the body that is imaged again and again. Important to note that the mannequin and the advertisement, the bodies, image the “ideal woman” as “white.” It makes “ideal womanhood” inaccessible to women of color, thereby enforcing a cycle of idealization and struggle to obtain a womanhood that is impossible. “Ideal Womanhood,” then, continues to reinforce ideas of subordination, inadequacy and self doubt and perpetuates the power systems that promote this ideology.

Horizontally, the three images in each row represent the animation that occurs as you walk by.

Horizontally, the three images in each row represent the animation that occurs as you walk by.

Horizontally, the three images in each row represent the animation that occurs as you walk by.

“Selling Madonna” looks at the history of images of mother and child. Specifically the project looks at representations of mother and child in advertising published in parenting magazines in the year 2005 and looks at similar images from renaissance paintings. Together the set of images presents an iconography of motherhood that is over 500 years old and continues to saturate media images today.

As the viewer walks past the images they morph from images that distinctly read as advertisements to images that reference Christian renaissance art of the Madonna and child. The process of morphing creates grotesque images of motherhood that, for me, question reality and the truth of photos and paintings. How many mothers are actually represented by these classic images, or, more importantly, how many mothers or images of parenting are left out? Motherhood is not always romantic, as the classic images might suggest.

View documentation.