New Media SculptureI create large, mechanized vignettes and dystopian machines in my sculptural and installation work. These pieces that center humanoid figures. Cycles and loops drive the movement of the bodies. This work focuses on connection, emotion, and identity formation. The base emotion often being frustration about the user experience of operating a human body. In an era where our reality is shaped heavily by the screens and sounds of the tech that surrounds us, connection is simultaneously more effortless and more impossible than ever. Our identities, ideas and emotions can be carefully curated online for the viewership of our friends, family, colleagues, and collectors of our data. Our experience is as real as it isn’t. Ironically, as our means of connecting increase so does our isolation.
Many of the machines I create are tragically trapped within the confines of their functionality and code. Some hint at an ironic self-awareness while performing their Sisyphean tasks. Others are amalgamations of pre-existing machines struggling to couple. Their imperfect connections create new machines which mimic what they will never become. They attempt to achieve a “natural” looking behavior unnatural to the materials they consist of. The cycle of attempting to cover what they are and mimic what they are not will break them down eventually. My interest lies in twisting and misusing pre-existing systems to convey struggle and persistence in a novel way. I’m influenced by concepts that make a case for resisting the systems and constructs we operate within. They push for the breaking of broken systems and the carving out of space for unique identities, ways of seeing and functioning |
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