Install documentation of MFA thesis show at San Francisco State University, 2022
How Are You Holding Up? presents sculptures that ask how we can emotionally persevere as our world’s tensions stretch us to our limits.
Some works disintegrated, deflated, or otherwise changde form due to entropy. The rubber bands in holding together / falling apart snapped several times throughout the course of the exhibition; I repeatedly repaired the work as a metaphor for emotional maintenance. In another work titled, stretching for balance, a balloon slowly deflated under a heavy piece of plexiglass. The transformation of the balloon is comical and highlights an acceptance of temporality.
Contrasting the acute precarity in many of the works, I explored an ongoing meditative action to create one and two and three and four and. For five months prior to the exhibition, I hand-colored thousands of sheets of vellum with a yellow wax marker. Because my goal was to meditate on joy, I paid attention to my embodied experience during each sitting and only colored the sheets of vellum for as long as it felt satisfying.
Without any prescriptive answers or resolutions, the work in this exhibition posits that letting ourselves break or fall apart might lead to healing, that emotional stability and growth require everyday maintenance and care, and that if we look a little closer, we might see that we are stronger than we realize.