American Appraisal (2016-2019)
This series is a direct response to my internal processing of the USA 2016 election, grappling with being both a woman and a member of the LGBTQ+ community in America within this political climate, the #MeToo movement's momentum, and the consequences of late-stage capitalism. I strive to initiate dialogue and create an experience through which viewers contemplate their relationship to (and with) language — because few things are as powerful and political as language.
Often the selected text in my work comes directly from words spoken to me by men, words that I experience as a woman in America (or which I find to be quite universally problematic examples of patriarchal white capitalism’s manipulating human-to-human interaction), or words which originate from a specific memory. This work was made in part as a response to the phrase, “Your value to us diminishes,” while scrutinizing and auditing what dictates my own relationship(s) to the word 'value' as a bisexual American woman. The work explores questions such as: Why does a person’s value vary based on capitalistic notions of merit? What is the purpose of applying value to people as if we are objects?
When words are presented within a visual context that lacks an overarching verbal narrative context or author, each subjective has a choice of role: speaker, receiver, or observer. The (usually subconscious) selection of a role, along with the viewer’s subjective version of the text’s meaning, is revealing of self, of experience(s) with societal impositions, or both. Hopeful that America's trudging toward more complete notions of gender equality can be sped up by Non-Exclusionary Radical Intersectional Feminists, it is my intent to present visual representations which assert: we see through your smoke screen, we stand together, and America is better off eradicating the exhausting American "ideal" that value is strictly reserved for the monetary/that which is quantifiable.
This series is a direct response to my internal processing of the USA 2016 election, grappling with being both a woman and a member of the LGBTQ+ community in America within this political climate, the #MeToo movement's momentum, and the consequences of late-stage capitalism. I strive to initiate dialogue and create an experience through which viewers contemplate their relationship to (and with) language — because few things are as powerful and political as language.
Often the selected text in my work comes directly from words spoken to me by men, words that I experience as a woman in America (or which I find to be quite universally problematic examples of patriarchal white capitalism’s manipulating human-to-human interaction), or words which originate from a specific memory. This work was made in part as a response to the phrase, “Your value to us diminishes,” while scrutinizing and auditing what dictates my own relationship(s) to the word 'value' as a bisexual American woman. The work explores questions such as: Why does a person’s value vary based on capitalistic notions of merit? What is the purpose of applying value to people as if we are objects?
When words are presented within a visual context that lacks an overarching verbal narrative context or author, each subjective has a choice of role: speaker, receiver, or observer. The (usually subconscious) selection of a role, along with the viewer’s subjective version of the text’s meaning, is revealing of self, of experience(s) with societal impositions, or both. Hopeful that America's trudging toward more complete notions of gender equality can be sped up by Non-Exclusionary Radical Intersectional Feminists, it is my intent to present visual representations which assert: we see through your smoke screen, we stand together, and America is better off eradicating the exhausting American "ideal" that value is strictly reserved for the monetary/that which is quantifiable.
