18. by/product
2016, Duplex Gallery, Portland, OR + SOIL Gallery, Seattle, WA
In 2016, I got my first real studio. Up until this point, I had been working out of either my living room or bedroom, including during college. Although I now know that most art programs allow students to have their own studios, or shared studio spaces, at Michigan State University, only the painters got studios. Because I was in the film photography and ceramics departments, I had only a shared work table and a designated shelf space my senior year (I was too naïve to be enraged by this fact until many years later).
But in 2016, after a years of being on the waitlist, I had the opportunity to move to the Bemis Building in SoDo, a starkly industrial part of Seattle, where I rented a 1600sqft space for a $1/sqft. This move coincided with a few opportunities that allowed me to launch my art career in Seattle, and it changed my practice permanently. I had the space to work larger, to experiment with many different techniques and materials, and to work on different projects at one time.
The building itself, an old warehouse converted into live/work lofts for artists, was across the railroad tracks from the Port of Seattle. The single paned, floor to ceiling windows in the long, tall space, would rattle from the noise of freight trains that blew their horns at all hours of the day as they came or left the port.
The cyan circle is where my studio was in the building, and the red line shows the tracks the freight trains used, moving forward and back all night in order to load or unload their cargo into the cargo yard. Each time they crossed the street right in front of the building, often very slowly, they had to blow their horn. Often this meant the horn would go for 15-30 second intervals every few minutes for an hour, often between the hours of 2 and 4am.
To get away from the noise, which kept me up all night and rattled my nervous system throughout the day, I went on long walks through the ‘neighborhood’, which was really just a series of warehouses and cargo storage facilities punctuated by a baseball stadium, the Starbucks headquarters, and a Home Depot. On these walks, I expanded my childhood practice of digging through the household trash to find things I could repurpose as art supplies: I began to dumpster dive.
I started with furniture. All of the equipment that populated my studio, work tables and surfaces, chairs, and even the 8ft bookshelves that I used to separate the work space from my bed, were discarded objects.
Then I moved onto materials for my art. I am a hoarder of objects naturally. This habit is driven by many impulses: a habit of scarcity, a fervent dislike of waste, and a love for objects for which others could see no future possibility. With the new space afforded to me by my studio, and the sudden access I had to so many industrial dumpsters, I just let myself go for it, walking home while dragging large foam pieces, piles of reflective plastic discards, and 4x8ft offcuts from a local sign shop.
When I brought them back to my studio, I dealt with these new, foreign materials by working on an intimate, domestic scale that felt familiar to me, which is how this body of work was born.
artist statement:
This small body of work explores the inherent tension between two discordant systems that are forced to reside within the same space and context. By using domestic craft materials that evoke body, hair, and earth, and combining them with rudimentary industrial materials, I hope to evoke a sense of non-belonging and discomfort, the same emotions that are inherent in my existence as a racialized and gendered person living in the United States.
My experience forces me to find and create intersections in two cultures that sit in opposition with one another. It is in these created intersections that a third culture, a marginalized and misunderstood culture — my culture — exists. Similarly, these objects serve as relics of a third system that is created at the meeting of industry and domesticity. Outwardly, they are objects that seem to serve no decipherable function, and yet their material language indicates a sense of purpose and industry for a system that the viewer may not have a point of reference to understand or know, a system that continues to exist regardless.
this piece, which was shown at a three-person show (with Jessica Hoffman and Markel Uriu) at SOIL Gallery, was the first time I started being interested in working with discarded wood and thread. The whole piece was held together by a few brackets, one screw in the wall, and thread and tape. It swayed when anyone walked by, and this precarity and aliveness was the beginning of a way of working that I still continue today.