Nothing "There", "Nothing" There

Everyday we communicate, navigate, deconstruct and reconstruct boundaries in our internal and external lives as a means to control our experiences. We do this in an attempt to keep ourselves “safe” from “others”, but this is a false sense of protection. Systemic boundaries follow this pattern and morph to maintain the oppression of those in our communities who are marginalized. Awareness of this false sense of protection we have grown to rely on has made me fully invested in the body as a tangible boundary to explore imagined and actual environments. My work uses familiar boundary-making materials to create absurd spaces that function as metaphors for the arbitrary ways we construct environments in an attempt to exclude “danger”. I use art as the tool for exploring and exploiting these false notions of safety, with all of their comedy and tragedy. I have made a commitment to navigate these spaces intentionally. I explore these objects + forms as someone who has always believed inanimate objects to possess their own unique essence. On one hand, this allows the objects + forms to take on their own experiences, as I imagine them to be animated, invoking the absurd. As we utilize these objects as tools for boundary making, it further reveals their absurdity and the ephemeral nature of our environments. Nothing "there", Nothing There was the name of my thesis, and the work that came from this period reflects on the accompanying written works found here.