MFA Thesis Exhibition, Mills College, Oakland, CA. May 2021.

Painting Installation

Moving across the country to pursue my MFA just months before Covid, Zoom school has been my community. Painting twelve oil portraits based on class screenshots, I acknowledge this surreal reality: green screen, Moog, and tennis lessons – all learned on our screens, in the company of pets. The paintings sit in a grid atop a painted Zoom window, functioning as one artwork. I give thanks to community; individually we navigate, together we persist. 

Each day of Shelter-in-Place, I velcro a spiderette to my houseplant. The methodical processes involved in creating “Add One Spiderette Per Day” and “Home Sweet Home” pass time and allow me ownership over the indoor space to which I am confined.

Music Videos

I extend an offering to my audience to reimagine our Covid-era landscapes by dancing along to my music videos. “Black Rectangles,” set on Zoom, consists of screen-recorded Zoom footage. Processing this through Max, my pixelated figure dances through this virtual landscape. Atmospheric Moog recordings, catchy synth parts, vocoded vocals, and processed field recordings of clicks create a danceable, digital pop space.

In “Taking Turns to Care,” a slow Moog lead-in picks up a chaotic rhythm that increases in urgency as I bring in buzzy synths and vocals that build, in desperation. The shifting rhythms include a repetitive sample I recorded of a laundromat quarter machine. Shooting the video at the local laundromat where I’ve done my laundry throughout the pandemic, I embed the tensions that now exist as we navigate shared, public spaces. Whether viewed in a museum black box, or at home on a personal screen, both music videos are an invitation to my audience to practice patience and resilience – and to dance.

Hinge Arts Residency. Fergus Falls, MN. August 2021.

While a Hinge Arts Resident in Fergus Falls, MN in August 2021, I created this piece through assembling 238 individually painted canvas outlines of lily pads. American White Water-Lilies are native to Minnesota lakes, often forming dense colonies. The lily pads of “Rain Catcher” represent the strength of individuals coming together in community, and their ability to create powerful change, as a united front. I invited Minnesotans to share their memories, dreams, fears, and hopes for the local watershed by writing them on painted canvas raindrops, and attaching these raindrops to the lily pad net. I hoped to create a space for community dialogue on the local drought, and how to move forward, protecting the local watershed from current threats of climate change and Big Oil. Stemming from conversations with Fergus Falls community members on low river levels and a lack of rainfall this summer, the creation of the piece also coincided with weeks of Line 3 protests.

Zero1’s Impact Art AT 2021. September/October.

“In Search of Truth” was a new media arts exchange I participated in along with six other Bay Area creatives. The 5-week-long exchange was led by artist Patrícia J. Reis, and produced in partnership with Open Austria and Ars Electronica. The 5-week-long exchange culminated in an online exhibition of prototypes in October. I partnered up with Stephanie Andrews and Erik Contreras to create a prototype for “Post-Industrial Ecology,” a speculative piece that confronts the challenge of foraging and farming in an industrial/urban environment — from toxic chemicals in our soil to human-made trash being dumped rather than recycled. View the exhibition and full project statement here.