EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENT: The body of work in Data Experience is an invitation to you – I invite you to become a participant and collaborator.  The core of my collaborative plea is our desperate need to reconsider the data at the root of our daily lives that we constantly consume and generate — iconography, conversations, our routines, etc.

I admit I should have invited you sooner – before the production of these systems for analysis, contemplation and creation.  Needless to say, these systems are not of much value unlessthey are put to use, tested and interrogated. Your efforts and contributionswill give each system and body of data meaning and life

The works in Data Experience include a number of entry points for collaboration and participation including (but not limited to): playing a game, scanning QR codes, telling stories, sensory input and initiating a dialogue.

Exhibition Catalog for Extreme Materials 2@ University of Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery curated by Marie Via

Exhibition Catalog for the 2011 UFVA New Media Exhibition designed by Juror Ellen Wetmore

Catalog for FIBER Plus Exhibition @ Blue Door Gallery. Designed by Juror Arlé Sklar-Weinstein

StoryQuilt installed @ Pixilerations v.8

Check out the short film documenting the installation process. I make a cameo about 2/3 of the way in!

View from outside of the Huret & Spector Gallery at Emerson College.

Story told on August 5, during the New Media Reception.

A story told on August 5.

StoryQuilt. 2011. Installed in Studio.

University Film and Video Association
Annual Conference New Media Exhibition.

August 3 – August 6, 2011

Emerson College: Huret & Spector Gallery
Tufte Performance and Production Center
10 Boylston Place, Sixth Floor
Boston, MA

Reception: 6-8pm on August 5, 2011

View documentation (including video) of StoryQuilt.

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.

2005. Installation @ Syracuse University

2005. Installation @ Syracuse University

2005. Installation @ Syracuse University Detail

“Borders” is a fabric hallway that existed for a week in the Quad of Syracuse University. The hallway brought attention to ways of seeing, ways of framing, and ways of blinding within our space. The walls blocked our normal physical perspective and viewpoints and drew attention to other ways of physically seeing the world. In five large “windows” were removable patches that provided a semiotic system provoking reflection on our understanding of borders, fields of vision, and mediation on our campus, in our lives and in our society.

2005. Installation @ Lanigan Hall, SUNY Oswego

“Childhood Truths” is a reactive environment that challenges adults to relocate themselves to the “baby blanket” (proportional to an adult) on the floor. The blanket consists of four baby toys that flip, open, close and move. That movement triggers a sensor in the Teleo system (microcontroller) that plays a story from my own childhood, revealing how I perceived the world was when I was a child. Each of the 1-2min stories shares a truth of my childhood. For example, the pink, hidden mirror unveils my belief, as a child, that evildoers live within the looking glass during the dark of night.

Adults must, at the very least, sit on the blanket and move the toys for the environment to react and narrate a story. Forcing an adult into this “floor” experience on the floor brings him/her to a more open thought process. Art is no longer understood by looking at a wall, but, rather, on the floor in a play mat or story circle manner, similar to the experiences of a preschooler, but where the environment mediates the experiences of a child.