Project Type: Wofford

Townhouse Trilogy

2008
video, drawings, prints

3 videos, drawings and prints situated in and around a stylized 1973 Barbie Townhouse, a triple-decker dollhouse with over-the-top trompe l’oeil backdrops. Space and interiority function emotionally and psychologically: this project explores how staged domestic space informs behavior.

Top Floor: Spellchecker
Spelling is a kind of wondrous precision, and “spell” also implies a form of magical incantation. The video’s subjects spell out lines and sentences as dialogue in a very private, hermetic language and a space much like a child’s private domain.

Middle Floor: Impostor
A variety of women saying things that indicate varying permutations of impostor phenomenon, a condition fraught with unnecessary self-doubt that many high-achievers internalize as a sense that they’re under-qualified, frauds, or impostors. Situated on the middle floor, in a sort of 70’s purgatory.

Ground Floor: Walking With Coffee
Kitchen as exit point for women obsessively bustling about, clutching cups of coffee to go. Drive, ambition and neuroses scale the absurdity of these on-the-go compulsive behaviors.

Inappropriate

video and drawing
2006

A gentle indictment of the perils of cronyism: to function as a community, one constantly engages in practices that are sycophantic and creepy but also tender, affectionate and genuinely intimate. This is a video and drawings of Bay Area art community friends, touching each other “inappropriately”.

The piece also addresses politics and star-making: who gets picked out for that extra coat of gloss, and who doesn’t. Friends “glossed” their chosen partner’s faces with shimmering cream makeup to make them glow: their matching ink portraits were also done on similarly pearlescent mica paper. The resultant work is tender, awkward, and funny: community members work in such professional and emotional proximity to one another, but can rarely acknowledge the intense intimacy involved in this.

Continuing the questionable taste of the theme, the video is set to James Taylor’s “You’ve Got A Friend,” and sports a hazy, soft-core filter.

Earthquake Weather

2014
drawing, web project
1989quake.com

“Earthquake Weather” is one of those great, nonsensical phrases that the Bay Area has used for years. The belief that weather might foreshadow seismic activity is a notion that has been around for centuries, but the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake is largely what popularized its use in Northern California.

Earthquake Weather is an illustrated collection of people’s personal stories of the quake.

Fronteraland

2013
installation
hand-painted signs
*with Kyle Herbert

6 large signs installed on the theatre grounds of Cal Shakes, in response to Richard Montoya’s carnivalesque play “American Night” about immigration, discrimination and citizenship. Each sign addressed related American histories in the very tongue-in-cheek style of an amusement park “attraction” advertising its perils and pleasures.

Ofrenda

2012
installation
Oakland Museum of California

This altar was created for OMCA’s annual Day of the Dead curated exhibition, and focused on those who served as nurses, healers, and caregivers.

In the arena of caregiving, everyday people achieve a remarkable balance by providing precise and rigorous care that is also highly intuitive and compassionate. To this end, the geometric wall painting pattern references the balanced, meditative patterns of Swiss artist and healer Emma Kunz. Historic images and animations of nurses and patterns flicker across 5 digital frames; the paper frames and flowers encasing each frame are hand-crafted.