FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT
For Your Entertainment was a solo exhibition at UnchARTed Gallery in Lowell, MA (2018).
The show explored the complicated landscape of memory through drawing, painting, video installation, and found objects — confronting the tangible things that represent lost memories, phases of life, and identities. Making the work was a process of extreme emotional and physical expense — a documentation of movement into a place of retrospection.
"Each piece of work holds something of a past memory or a symbol that helps to keep her present to counteract the dissociative way she moves through her life."
— Boston Hassle, 2018
FYE [For Your Entertainment], 2018 1-channel video, 10:49 min.
Original performance: October 31, 2015, Salem, MA (2-hour performance)
A video documentation of a live performance exploring the shedding of physical objects that defined my adolescent years. The title is a nod to FYE (For Your Entertainment), the music and entertainment store that defined so much of my childhood. Wearing my middle school semi-formal outfit, I balance on a ball while displaying childhood bedroom posters emblematic of early 2000s pop culture as they rip, disintegrate, and are thrown aside — a metaphor for shedding the tokens of an adolescent identity. The lack of resolution demonstrates this catharsis as a never-ending process.
STUDIES OF IMPERMANENCE
"Begin at once to live, and count each day as a separate life." — Seneca
Studies of Impermanence was a solo exhibition at Arts Research Collaborative in Lowell, MA (2015), presented as part of the Jim Jeffers Drawing Residency — a program supporting recent graduates through four months of dedicated studio practice.
The show consisted of drawings and a sound installation exploring the residual loss embedded in every moment. Drawing on Buddhist concepts of impermanence, the work examines the inevitable transformation of the present into the past. The studio became a site of accumulation — personal writings, photographs,
mood logs, rotting vegetables and flowers, — all serving as both documentation and drawing material.
A PATIENT LIKE ME
A Patient Like Me
Oil, graphite, pastel, ink, colored pencil, and photo transfer on panel
Each bar of color represents my mood for roughly one day over four years, drawn from logs I kept on PatientsLikeMe — a platform I later learned sells de-identified patient health data to pharmaceutical companies. Along with mood, the records track distress levels, functioning, and treatment. Deep red is Very Bad, orange-red is Bad, grey is Neutral, dark blue is Good, and light blue is Very Good. Through color, text, and symbolism, the piece documents the rapid cycling of my inner life over time — a comment on self-help culture, the commodification of mental health, and the reduction of suffering to data.
