Using screenprinting, fluorescent acrylic sheets, found objects, projection, and dollar store scented trash bags like like or just a “like”? is a bold and immersive assemblage of surface and abstract imagery. Guided by a playful exploration of material, this body of work is influenced by my own anxious and disembodied search for identity and connection in my online and “away from keyboard” (AFK) life as an urban millennial. Failing normative expectations of adulthood and gender, screen obsessed, and using humor as a coping mechanism, this work takes place within a contemporary global framework, where interpersonal relationships are more isolated and digitally focused than ever in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. What does it mean to transmute feelings evoked digitally into material we can physically be with and touch? Embodying a Postdigital aesthetic, one fusing digital and analog means of making and utilizing the immersive characteristics of installation art, this work uses materiality, abstraction, and text to center and de-center the viewer calling on them to participate in an assemblage of simultaneously comforting and awkwardly disorienting material fragments within an all-encompassing atmosphere.
The fluorescent pink acrylic used in Pick me, girl. or an image of a silkscreen backlit in the washout sink, glow. Luminous, these materials seem to vibrate sending undetectable reverberations toward the viewer, engulfing them. Wandering and wading through a dimly lit assemblage of fragments the viewer is centered and de-centered, comforted and disoriented all at once. My screenprinting practice and digital image making inform the other and become irreversibly intertwined like our digital and AFK lives. Abstract and limitless, my assemblages of surface and fragments of imagery are unfixed and undetermined, shifting and expanding. Fermenting, until play, that sweet ecstasy hits.
Although it catches the eye, it's definitely a bit too much.
Laying in bed in complete darkness I stare at the glowing screen of my phone.
I know it's bad for me, but I just can’t stop.
