Capitalist Plaid (2020 - present)
Eva Hesse once asserted that Minimalism was a metaphor for the confinement of society. This is my springboard.
Interpreting 'value' indicates a complex semiosis. When coupled with a grid (actual or implied, disrupted or not), it suggests a system. Language is a political system. Referencing the historical use of the systematic grid in US American art, I engage the grid as a stand-in for the stifling heteronormative, white-supremacist, patriarchal system that marginalizes many groups of humans.
Intersectional feminist values propel my work. While scrutinizing and auditing what dictates my own relationship(s) to the word 'value' as a queer, cis-gendered, white, woman artist within our current political climate, this body of work became an examination of the larger consequences of late-stage capitalism within a society which commonly suggests that "value" is only reserved for that which is quantifiable:
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"My friend Chip Ward speaks of “the tyranny of the quantifiable,” of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency over enjoyment and quality; the utilitarian over the mysteries and meanings that are of greater use to our survival and to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose and value that survive beyond us to make a civilization worth having.”
– Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me |
