Installation View & Sink Sculpture
Statement
Interfaced, the second chapter in my Tranquility Haze Series, lives in the seams where skin, symbol, and screen meet. The works are interventions, traces, and transmissions of presence, intimacy, and crisis. Made with objects that bear the touch of my American life brushed against the instability of larger systems. Functioning as an unresolved interface.
In my displays of blackened and epileptic flashing American flags, I create a fevered symbol. A representation of my country collapsing under its own pulse, flickering between reverence and ruin. In my film, the blood drawn by my diabetic lancets stains the currency of exchange, transforming money into a record of sacrifice, a fingerprint where capital would prefer erasure, and a constant reminder of the need to financially afford my own well-being. ¹
Chains appear and reappear, lying beside envelopes, wrapped around lovers who mostly see each other through screens, caught between presence and distance. Portraits of loved ones, who once were closely present in my life but now mostly exist through my iPhone, have been turned into 3D meshes, skins without breath, and their presence in deterioration. Alligators surface as primal witnesses and southern icons, their stillness suggesting both danger and my personal endurance.
The alligator, the chain, and the lovers’ envelope intertwine predation, attachment, and memory, while the envelope as a container hints at how my personal moments are carried, hidden, or mailed into distance. The printed server image and photograph of the moon disrupt my relationship to scale, technology, and infrastructure, bringing together the everyday machinery of the internet with the unreachable physicality.
The photograms of used condoms, for example, vanish acts of cruising, intimacy, and abandoned data (DNA) into fragile spectral residues. A cigarette-littered sidewalk and a condom-sink with a glowing screen mark the new city in my new life as a body too. Exhausted, littered, and endlessly consuming and letting go. These works extend this logic into the digital and urban sphere. Each image, surface, or object is a residue of presence and personal fragments that bleed into larger collective structures of decay and mediation. Screens, prints, bodies, and national icons are reconstituted as sites of interference and exposure.
Across these disparate materials, I show possibilities at the point of contact: when symbols falter under their weight, when bodies register their marks on political and economic structures, when love, sex, and memory collide with capital and technology. To interface is to touch, but also to mediate. This ongoing series stages this tension, showing how our lives are lived across unstable thresholds where intimacy, crisis, and remembrance constantly fold into one another.
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¹ https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/01/641615877/insulins-high-cost-leads-to-lethal-rationing