Beds

Beds is a collection of bas-relief beds, carved out of balsa wood and accented with wood finish, in different states of quiet dishevelment. The different states of the bed sheets and pillows are taken from actual photographs of my bed taken after waking up in the morning. The quiet collection is inspired by the somber Shoes on the Danube memorial in Budapest, which is quiet yet numerous sculptures of every day objects.  

Each bed has four miniature springs on the bottom, reminding one of box spring mattresses. 

The beds are displayed with five large pillows, made of plastic bags, masking tape and stuffing, arranged haphazardly to become almost like game pieces on the playing board of a plastic-wrapped thick foamy platform.

Double Scoop

In response to Australian Ben & Jerry's ban on selling double scoop of same flavor ice cream until marriage equality is legal, I used a double scoop of ice cream as my medium for a temporal sculpture, documented below:

The sound accompanying the video is the sounds of the ice cream dripping on the sand, manipulated for a synthetic, mechanical sort of clock-ticking, glitchy sound. When the double scoops become dramatically separated from the cone and soiled by the sand, the voice says "separate them, right?" and then the hands further separate the two scoops and massage them into the sand until they become another form altogether. According to gotohoroscope.com, ice cream in dreams denotes prolonged romantic involvement with someone, patience in achieving goals, and participation in crucial events. Observing melting ice cream signifies missing out on something and/or chasing after a dream that is unrealistic.

The video shows the banned double scoop ice cream separated from a traditional cone, and heavily manipulated in a very public space, soiled and convoluted, then placed back into the traditional cone in its new form while multicolored ice cream melts and loses its colors on a rock with the passage of time, accented by the soft thumpy drip sounds.

Plastic Dreams

Using the limited materials of plastic bags, yarn, and masking tape, I formed a quilt designed to hang from the ceiling from multiple points, creating a saggy weighted feeling in the "fabric" of the cozy blanket. Inspired by sandals made of recycled plastic bags, I was very interested in using the plastic bags as a sort of fabric. I began stimulating ideas by shredded the bags into long strips (as utilized by Khalil Chishtee in his elegant plastic bag sculptures), braiding the bags, weaving them into a basket shape with wire, and so on, but finally landed on making neat squares of plastic bag material with no writing and limited color palette of Publix beige and Walmart gray.

The edges of the doubled-up plastic squares are held together by masking tape, a pleasant contrast of surface texture, which is further reinforced by the thick woven yarn. 

Soiled

I took my fascination with other languages and found dirty words to render with different found materials dependent on my associations with the words or languages. When looking at the piece, many do not speak Hawaiian, Afrikaans, Chinese, Icelandic, etc., thus creating a barrier to communication, much like geographic barriers dividing land. The viewer is only able to go off of visual cues, and hang on to the familiarity of letters in the Roman alphabet, albeit in unexpected, foreign configurations. Even though the words are foul, such as "scumbag" and "loose woman", this is not what the viewer automatically reads when looking at the display. The pieces all have letters and similar hidden meanings in common, but differ in appearance and material. The creative rendering of the curse words is in part inspired by some of the word art seen in "Graphic Design: The New Basics" by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips. The desire to see dirty words come to life in tangible form sprung from seeing unexpected words appear on Harlie Rush's embroidery hoops in "The Parallels Between Art and Shit". Many language sites and blog site forums aided in the discovery of the colorful foreign curse words.

Kúkalabbi - "scumbag" represented by dirt-filled sack spilling soil onto surface.

Jive Turkey really jives with the use of an electric pink pool noodle.

Sao huo, or "loose woman", fashioned out of orange tie wraps on found wire grate.

Kanapapikis, or "dumb ass", becoming a typeface in its own right from wrapped palm fronds.

Memento

For my memento I wanted to communicate the feeling of comfort and soft, plush fur that dominates my memory of being young and laying on a rug on the floor in my house hugging my plump cat Hunter. I was really small for my age when I was younger and Hunter's splayed out cat body was about the size of 5-6 year old me; Hunter was essentially a warm, fluffy, living body pillow. 

I made the hand palm-sized fur pillow out of cat fur and thread. First I had to harvest cat fur from my boy Hunter. 

He really enjoyed this part of the project.

I then took the collected fur and rubbed it between my hands repeatedly while waiting on hold during a phone call to make airline reservations. My goal was to make a felted sheet of "fabric" to sew together as the pillow case. 

The fur-matting in progress.

I washed the matted fur sheet with shampoo.

Sewing together the pillow case.

I flipped the pillow case inside out and cut off the top to prep the case for stuffing.

Stuffing the pillow case with extra loose cat fur.

The finished product details:

3D to 2D: Dust Ball House

I took the floating pieces of my memory house map relief and made them into a pattern. I then filled the spaces in between with a photograph of my cat fur memento pillow. The result is a "dust ball house" that resonates with me personally because I have grown up with two cats in the house who shed an extreme amount and fur/dust mixup balls float around the floor of the house. 

Map Relief

This segmented map relief records the layout of my childhood home as I remember it at the age of four. The map is essentially a memory space: the pieces fit together but are displayed with space between, almost as if the rooms are floating, threatening to drift away at any moment. Each piece I included in the map of my house correlates with a specific memory in the house. The childhood-crafty nature of the pieces is also related to the idea of a childhood memory; the crafting is child-like, with simple materials and shapes reflecting the boiled-down nature of my memories from that young age. 

My process began with a simple exercise to draw my childhood home with my eyes shut. I was surprised at the results of this activity because what I thought in my mind was going to be a huge, page-spanning drawing turned out to take up only one half of the page. While drawing with my eyes closed the memories of the space in my house were so spacious and the house seemed so large, yet the reality was that the lines came out repetitive, tightly-spaced, with an almost frantic appeal. I am attracted to the way the chaotic squirmy lines fill the corner of the page and decided to explore the idea of a memory space further in the actual map relief. The number I chose to associate and utilize in the map is the number 4 because that is the age I moved into the house I have mapped out, there are four members in my family (meaning four kitchen seats, four places, etc.), and four was my favorite number for the majority of my childhood. 

As a quick three-dimensional sketch I quickly put together a "living room" out of a jagged piece of foam board. I built stairs by covering a paper structure with a gel and water soaked tissues. Because the stairs lead upstairs to the dark and scary loft area, there are jagged, frightening steps and black ink splotches.

With this first piece completed, made other island pieces that would fit around the living room and cut them out of the foam board base. 

 To make the foam board look less like foam board I gave a lot of treatment to the surface of the boards, taking a lot of time to think of ways to represent the unique floorings of each room in the house. When I was younger I spent a lot of time sitting and laying on the floors so I got to them extremely well. Therefore, the flooring of my memory house is very detailed.

Torn paper strips covered with matte gel and layered to reflect wood flooring as I remember it.

To accentuate the cracks and grains of the wood flooring I brushed on some watered-down ink to the paper strips.

The swirly flooring of the utility room reflects the swirls of glues that are put down to hold down carpeting. My dad did a lot of remodeling work in the house and much of the time the floor was bare concrete with the swirls of glue hinting at the previous existence of carpet. This is very similar to how it looked.

 For the computer room I wanted a large computer screen because my sister and I spent a lot of time playing games on the computer. To make the computer screen I found this shiny inside of a perfume gift box and repurposed it to become the screen of the computer.

The gift box torn apart.

The computer screen attached to the computer room tile flooring.

I added an additional material - balsa wood scraps - fashioned in the shape of Cheese Nips. The washing machine room also doubles as an imagined play space because laundry days were when I remember having a full day to play games with my sister. Therefore the paper scrap pile represents a pile of pillows for pillow forts and the nestled Cheese Nip crackers represent my sister and I, happily nestled in the pillow fort while the laundry churned away.