(The concept behind the 5 paintings below)
V-Project: I am making an effort to reclaim the lost territory of connection and continuity in the chronology of historical discourse. The components I created are unsentimental symbols of vaginas—not meant to be essentialist or reductive, but imaging a part of the body hidden, yet not sealed off from the external world; they are passageways—not fixed points—connecting the inside with the outside, binding one being to another in complicated ways. They are portraits, memoir, autobiography, documentary, fictions.
Systems are an overt and underlying theme in my recent work: the grid, repetition, units, layers, time; concepts of closed systems where nothing can get in or out and open systems where there is permeability. Patterns: of society, politics, aesthetics, science, disciplines, people. “How do you anticipate a future you haven’t experienced?” was a question that arose from trying to understand the multiple systems converging into the current economic crisis and the people affected; with the abstraction of statistics, we don’t comprehend the meaning of the data, the context, the realities of the actual people represented by numbers, formulas, and equations. This study segued into my “vagina” project— gender based crimes of war and domestic violence.
