Becoming

My experience growing up in the rural South serves as a rich repository of memories and inspiration for the construction of my work, which uses personal history to explore fleeting things in order to allow moments of ontological and spiritual "vulnerability" to be shared by others. These shared and unpredictable actions give form to the transience of experience, specifically, that of loss and the gap between memory and desire. These situations work in a lingering way, rather than an instant way, allowing for a philosophical pondering of meaning. The emotional charge of my work exists in its ability to create transforming experiences within brief, sometimes absurd acts that draw attention to the significance of common actions or objects, allowing others to form their own story in response to what they have witnessed.

Hybrid is a series of drawings in which animals combine with the bodies of young girls to form unique beings like no other. They are ugly, charming, odd, homely, suspended in a mysterious state of becoming. The video, Becoming, portrays a similar mysterious state, but here I am the human part and common office-issued transparent tape is the mechanism by which I transform- and then un-transform - my own body into a hybrid state, allowing for multiple interpretations of the results of this action. This private action, carried out only a few times in front of the mirror, and then "performed" for the camera, raises a complex range of emotions from fear to empathy to sorrow.

 

Still from "Becoming" Video