“MY CONSTRUCTION IS MY PURPOSE AND THIS IS WHAT GIVES ME FREEDOM.” is an autobiographical portrait and multimedia installation referencing relational aesthetics, slow television, and art education philosophy. Anchored to a large, softened beach stone, a rope adorned with hand formed beads made of unpigmented salt dough passes through a massive archway and ascends toward the ceiling, at which point the beads and rope loosen to form a tassel that cascades back down to the viewer to reveal a video phone screen displaying live surveillance footage of the artist’ studio from a bird’s-eye view.
A visual poem, this installation reflects upon the artist’s life in three parts: the salt dough beads revealing their grip and the relief of their palms to communicate a tactile process and the naive making of memories; the archway, made of canvas drop cloth and suspended from the ceiling, present as conceptually strong while physically compromised as its posts drape onto the floor, acquiescing to the inevitable gravity of being; the video phone presents the artist’s studio space in real-time, welcoming the viewer into their practice for introspective learning and material dialogues in the present moment.
As viewers follow the line of salt dough beads from the rock, through the archway, up to the ceiling and back down to standing height, they too are guided through the canvas archway; maintaining their movement, and in an allusion to Mark Strand’s 1979 poem “Keeping Things Whole”, engage with the physical process of compromising and healing a space simultaneously.
Exhibition statement:
Beads, archways, and video monitors are objects that are defined by the space they do not occupy. A bead is not a bead without a hole. An archway is not an archway if it does not have the space for things to rest upon it or move under it. A monitor is not a monitor without projected light behind it, projecting from one world into another. It is the framed and articulated, unoccupied space by these structures that generate their meaning as well as their purpose.
These beads are my memories. The things I have learned, molded and embedded, small enough that I may carry them with me, heavy enough that I may let them stay behind.
This archway is my body. Its formal structure conceptualized with ideal, simple strength; I bear tremendous weight and hold space for the safe passage of those who are keeping things whole.
The video is my place. It is the space I have made for making the dysfunctional into the functioning, the wrong into right, and the disturbed into beauty. In real-time I demonstrate to the viewer the ways art can be the tool that heals us.
Healing is a process born of necessity in an instaneous time of abstract pain and grief. This is my process, fostered by the idea of showing it to someone else. Someone who may also be in need of finding a way through similar memories to the ones I know. Someone in need of a process. Someone who can learn from me and let me know they’ve seen my process.
