Artist in Residence Program
As the Artist in Residence at Montgomery County Community College, I had the pleasure of working in a beautiful studio, interact with the student body, and exhibit a full breadth of my work in their Open Gallery during the Fall Semester of 2024.
This Residency was an opportunity to explore different material and processes in both drawing and textile work. As an expansion in my drawing practice, I learned and experimented with colored soft pastels to expand the smoke (and now fire) body of work. The manipulation of the soft pastels differed dramatically from white charcoal in its thickness and texture, making the process of creating smokey and ethereal images more difficult. The resulting work increases the vibrant and urgent quality of this series, insisting that the symbology of smoke as a warning sign of American fascism is no longer a warning but a raging inferno.
The large studio and generous gifting of scrap fabric and old clothes allowed me to greatly expand my textile practice. As the first major attempt at quilting, The Land Grows Through its Scars (depicted on the left) depicts both a field of poppies and a body of bullet-like wounds. Combining methods of machine quilting, hand-sewn sculptural embroidery, and beading, this piece acknowledges the traumas of war and genocide on the land and its people while also asserting that regrowth is possible and achievable through collective effort.
The overarching motivation of this residency differed greatly from the Torpedo Factory residency earlier in 2024 based entirely off of the demographic of viewers. While I felt empowered to inform and awaken viewers of the Torpedo Factory of the violences in Gaza, the need to empower the students of MCCC was not a priority. In speaking to a largely younger audience, this residency called me to search for the small amounts of hope that are needed through revolutionary times. Hope does not disregard the harsh realities but sees a way through them: envisioning a possible future that is worth fighting for.
SOOT-CHARGED AND SUTURED marks my second solo exhibition as well as a career retrospective. The decision to install a retrospective show at MCCC was meant to highlight the full diversity of my practice and inspire students to explore a variety of materials and processes in their practice while adhering to central visions and themes.
This exhibition connects two central through-lines in my practice: the chronic pains and sensualities of queer body and the existential and urgent pondering of our souls in grand and political space. Spanning nearly 10 years of work, the progression of practice is displayed through varying materials including oil painting, oil pastel and charcoal drawing, etching, hand-sewn textile, embroidery, and soft sculpture.
As a queer body writhing in chronic pains and gender dysphoria, the voids, orifices, wounds, and knots of body have developed from geometric abstraction, through microscopic soft pastel abstractions, and into gauze embroideries; all of which overlap the personal and political experiences of being a body experiencing collective trauma.
The amorphous experiences of existentialism has also developed from explorations of myth, through an overlap of black hole astrophysics and spirituality, into the more grounded witnessing of current global atrocities from late stage capitalism, fascism, and genocide.
This solo show features the aesthetic and thematic connections throughout an early, post-undergrad, art career as well as the trajectory of my practice going forward.
