Alter ∆ Altar
Alter ∆ Altar began in August 2019 as an immersive VR project named "Otherworld". In this virtual space I tried to accumulate the images, symbols, and memories that communicated the impact of losing my sister in July 2018. The nature of grief in social-technological landscapes is a difficult topic to fully breach because our main avenue of remembering, seeking, and reliving memory through social media can be alienating, and harmful. "Otherworld" was presented as a 4-channel video installation.
Alter ∆ Altar is a physical proxy for the original VR. The space includes a journal documenting the process of grief and the creation of the installation. Symbolic objects grapple with the themes of instability, growth, decay, and stagnation. A three-legged table upholds a video projector as it displays cut-pasted family videos. Both projects seek to understand the aftermath of a loved one's death when their images live on through an internet of physical objects and digital systems.
Portals
This poster was created for UT design's WKRM that pairs young designers with real world clients to gain experience in professional design practices. Our task for this project was to create a motivational poster for designers struggling with inspiration. The poster is a two-color Risograph print on 11"x17" Goldenrod paper.
"Mistakes are the portals of discovery" is a phrase inspired by the writing of James Joyce in his novel Ullyses. Interestingly, the quote itself is a paraphrase of the author's actual words: "A man of genius makes no mistakes, his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."
Studium Lutum
“Studium and Lutum” was a temporary installation at Right Before Gallery in the Fine Arts Building at the University of Texas for “on this floor” a group show featuring the work of Elaine Adams, Haley Hill, and Jacob Bruner. The focus of this group show was the way that artists reshape the context of everyday objects through the act of framing. With this idea in mind I enacted a performance using found objects such as dirt, water, cinderblocks, and metal scraps in order to heighten the importance of these objects simply by committing my entire body to their whim for an hour-long period. I began with a pile of dirt, and a stack of cinderblocks reminiscent of a shrine;
in this shrine was a container full of water which slowly filled with dirt. Mixing the dirt and water with my hands mud began to form, and the smell of wet earth filled the studio. Once the entire pile of dirt was mixed into mud I began forming it into small compact orbs that would fill the shrine and surrounding floor. This piece is entitled “Studium and Lutum” based on Roland Barthes theory of “Studium and Punctum” where a photograph contains both formally and emotionally charged elements. However, Punctum (the emotionally charged element) is replaced by Lutum (mud) in this performance and installation.
Dissolved in a Ray of Light
In this project I chose a textual source, and one seemingly unrelated visual source to create a poster. I chose the poem “Une saison en enfer” by Arthur Rimbaud because it explores the beauty found in drunken stupors, and unclean places. The poem, roughly translated, describes a drunken barfly daydreaming of flowers and rays of light in a toilet stall.
Beauty found in imperfect places can be transcendental, and this idea struck me as I looked through photos I had taken while in Lampasas, Texas on a friend’s ranch. This ranch holds the skeletal structures of abandoned cabins and unfinished houses alongside ravines, waterfalls, flowers, and piles of stone.
The desolation serves only to highlight the beauty of this space.
These posters were created with cyanotype, a solution which reacts to sunlight by exposing uncovered areas in blue, and conceptually intertwines these objects to the image of being dissolved by light (“dissout un rayon!”)
“Oh! le moucheron enivré à la pissotière de l’auberge, amoureux de la bourrache, et que dissout un rayon!” - Arthur Rimbaud, "Une Saison en enfer"
Liminal Zone: Endless Ritual
Liminal space is the area between two determined places. It is a zone such as that of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”, where social order is reversed and bio-technological organisms roam freely. Liminal Zone: Endless Ritual began in a transmedia studio with a prompt:Investigate the relationship between our bodies and the technology surrounding it.
As a starting point I thought of the relationship between my physically-archived memories and the digital memories stored on my computer.
In order to respond to this blurring of physical and digital memoryI created Liminal Zone: Endless Ritual. The video is framed as an immersive virtual reality experience where the protagonist must endlessly repeat a three-part ritual (separation, transition, and incorporation) to restore a memory artifact in a preordained liminal zone. By using a chest-mounted GoPro, Phone camera, and Mac webcam the viewer is placed within a constantly shifting environment that blurs the boundaries of technology and the body.
