Artist Statement
Harness From Here - Interfaced lives in the seams where skin, symbol, and screen meet. These works are interventions, traces, and transmissions of presence, intimacy, and crisis. They reflect an urgent need to document a life where the visual language of democracy coexists with spectacles of societal control. A life where my position in the world is shown through an unresolved interface.
The works in this series are composed of objects that bear the touch of an American existence, brushed against the instability of larger systems. In the display of blackened and flashing American flags, I create a fevered symbol that represents a country flickering between reverence and ruin. This tension extends to the body itself; in the George Washington video, blood drawn by diabetic lancets stains the currency of exchange, transforming the dollar into a record of sacrifice and a constant reminder of the financial burden of my own health.
The exhibition is informally staged on bulletin boards, functioning as a diaristic system rather than a fixed hierarchy. Borrowing the logic of personal pinboards or investigative evidence walls, meaning emerges through association and proximity. This scattered archive of my lived experience—moments of communication, exposure, and restraint—destabilizes traditional symbols, prompting us to question how one is constructed within the grid.
In my compression of militarized public space. Keychains depicting the military occupation of Washington, D.C. (objects typically reserved for souvenirs) are arranged according to the flag’s star structure. Here, the occupation is no longer an external “event” to be observed; it is a portable, mundane reality I carry in my pocket.
Throughout the work, motifs of attachment and separation come and go. Chains wrap lovers, who are primarily connected through screens, grappling with the tension between presence and distance. Portraits of loved ones are rendered as 3D meshes, in digital distortion, while their physicality is continually replaced by video calls. Along with these works, the alligator emerges as a primal witness and Southern icon, its stillness suggests a bond of danger and endurance. These elements (chains, envelopes, and predators) intertwine to illustrate how intimacy persists even in environments designed to regulate it.
In my diary, love is not an escape from structure. Instead, it is the friction that arises when we resist being atomized by it. My engagement with politics warrants an engagement with sexuality, so I consider how queer intimacy persists in environments marked by discipline, doctrine, and surveillance. Love becomes a subtle form of resistance, but also a reminder of the vulnerability of personal freedom.
In an installation of laptops, ASCII text processes location, memory, and violence around me as mere units of information. If the server functions as an intangible storehouse accessible to the state, then these screens reveal a sobering truth: our most intimate moments are being harvested by systems that do not perceive us as individuals.
Across these materials, the work explores the point of contact where symbols falter and bodies register their marks on these systems. Within the limits of unstable political regimes, technological infrastructures, and religious traditions, I search for fleeting moments of beauty, tenderness, and clarity to define the boundaries of a contemporary existence.