Where Stories Repeat Themselves
The land is a physical story that is constantly being rewritten and revised. This story that we are all a part of is radically shifting. Whole narratives are being deleted at an alarming rate. While many of us are often preoccupied with these large shifts, the smaller more nuanced changes to our stories can be overlooked. It is often beyond the personal power of the individual to stop these revisions to the land around us, the least we can do is document and remember.
Where Stories Repeat Themselves is a memorial to the land around me. This video montage is a reflection of a personal archive of experience. The videos were collected over three years on roadtrips through Colorado, Nebraska, Utah, New Mexico, Kansas, Missouri and Texas. These videos span a variety of moments and landscapes, from lightning in the Rocky Mountain National Park, salamanders in Nebraska, coastal marshland in Texas, and cows crossing an irrigation ditch in Colorado.
The videos have been blurred and integrated with monotypes - the monotypes were created through intuitive additive and reductive mark making with water-based ink on a plexi plate and then printed. The act of creating the monotypes, the instances of reflection that were integral in their making, allows me to further imbed the memory and experience of these moments into my psyche. By digitally blending the physical monotype with video I am shifting the focus from the actual experience to the memory and reflection of the experience. When the small things, the stories of the land that are important to us on a personal level, are gone, the memory will remain.
Stills from Where Stories Repeat Themselves, 5:20, 2020
Where Stories Repeat Themselvesmonotypes
6 in x 6 in
2019 - present
From Nowhere to No Place,
fusible foam, wool roving, vintage fabric, felt and thread
2018 - present
In popular culture the mythical minotaur is a symbol of violent straight cisgender male masculinity. I see the minotaur much differently. The monster from the myth was misunderstood and hated by his family, and by society, for being different. As a queer woman I can identify with this sort of monster. The mask is the soft and physical object that facilitates my alter-self. I use the mask to explore and to document my discomfort with society, and with the discomfort that society has taught me to feel for myself. This body of work is ongoing, and continuously evolving as I explore my surroundings, both physical and psychological.
Erosion
3:40 min
2020
Erosion is a self-reflective video performance that draws connections between the body and the land. We contribute to the erosion of the people and places around us, and are in turn eroded by our experiences. Although it is a process of gradual destruction, it is also a natural sculptural process. Like wind, rain and ice eat away layers of ancient sand dunes to expose red rock spires - so too do the people and things we experience chip away at who we think we are, leaving our core-self bare to existence.
Road Maps
graphite on paper
dimensions variable
2019 - present
Road Maps is an ongoing series of drawings that rely on the relationship between my hand, a pencil, a sketchbook, and the movement of my car. The roads represented by these drawings encompass unpaved or rough mountain passes, county roads that lead to and from State or National wildlife areas and historical monuments. These drawings are an unconscious yet deliberate meditation on movement and the physical experience of traversing roads that lead to, from, and between the boundaries of contemporary cultivated and managed land-space.
Fragments (#1, #2, #3 & #4)
etchings and chine-collé with hand-coloring
12 in x 12 in
Fragments is a body of work that investigates the parts of a person that culminate in the whole. This series is fueled by my interest and identification with the minotaur in Greek mythology. The minotaur in my work is a placeholder for my own feelings about my identity and how I feel I am seen in society. My minotaur is not the same minotaur from the island of Crete, this minotaur exists somewhere between the mountains of my new home in Colorado and the sprawling prairies and farmland of Nebraska. This body of work expresses my feelings surrounding being a Queer woman in the rural midwest lacking a community. The minotaur is half-human and half-bull; I feel half of one and half of another, something that doesn’t quite belong. By exploring the use of repeated imagery and alternative compositions I am learning to understand myself, the world around me, and my place within it.
If there is no space for me then I will create it myself.
