PROJECT DETAILS

This project is a body of work that was installed and exhibited in the Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University. It serves as the culmination of my Studio Art education at IU and was an exercise in developing and seeing through the entirety of the creative process. Exhibition photography provided by Garrett Ann Walters.

Artist Statement

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
—James Baldwin, “As Much Truth as One Can Bear”

My practice explores the concepts of repetition, perception, labor, and physical embodiment. This body of work focuses specifically on the risks we face as a society when we attempt to avoid or discard our painful histories. The fallibility of human memory is exploitable, providing opportunities for glossy misinformation campaigns and catchy, repeatable phrases. This perpetuates an unwillingness to reckon with history as it truly occurred. At best, we risk invalidating real lived experiences. At worst, we risk actually repeating past atrocities. Though there are plenty of recent examples of truth-avoidance and its outcomes (the outcry against Critical Race Theory in education; the banning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus at a school in Tennessee; the denial of 2020 election results and subsequent Capitol insurrection; the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, to name a few), this phenomenon is evergreen. Whether this is due to fragility, exceptionalism, insecurity, or defensiveness, it is crucial that we take steps to accept history with humility and vulnerability rather than attempting to revise it.

My work is a physical embodiment of recurrence and the cyclical nature of history. My body feels the physical pain of repetition as I push the yarn through the backing cloth tens of thousands of times. I invoke the passage of time by iteration, crafting 100 individual pieces, each slightly different from the one that came before it. While the object in the foreground remains, its form, color, and context morph over time, forever cycling through to inevitably return to its original form. The time period changes; the packaging of the message appears different; yet unless we reckon with the past, the phenomenon persists.