My practice, broadly speaking, focuses on relational aesthetics, particularly those of people, bodies, objects, labor, and space as it pertains to power and ontology. My work expands upon relational aesthetics to include the relations of all things, not singularly human, to address the philosophical underpinnings of Western thought that elevates human life to be superior to the remaining ecosystem.
Looking at the world through the lens of post-continental philosophy delineates the binary of people and things. Yet, this distinction becomes muddied as people are made figuratively into objects through objectification. Objectification requires (1) that something be made an object through the gaze of any onlooker and (2) that this object is, without consent, being placed under conditions to be assessed, harassed, consumed, and exploited. I argue that if we reshape our relationships with things and address the philosophical shortcomings of humanism that gave rise to the denial of human rights, capitalist exploitation, and environmental ruin, then we have the power to fix these global problems.
The current philosophical loophole to deny human rights is to make people figuratively objects, so I argue, If we liberate objects, then we liberate people. I began this research preoccupied with the desire to make furniture that facilitated comfort through the positioning of the body in various postures, only to find that ergonomic science was shaped by dimensions of military cis-male bodies to accommodate comfort and peak organ function. This fact thereby meant that the world was not designed for me and was not designed to accommodate my health and safety, not to mention all people who do not have cis-male military bodies.
My work challenges American institutional exclusionary design practices pertaining to the politics of space and exploitative labor practices. Through the process of object making, social practice, writing, furniture making, and performance, I work to dethrone political meta-narratives about worth and expendability in the built environment. I make furniture that range in materiality (ceramics, wood, metal, foam, etc.) and form from one that may appear as a prescriptive chair to another a giant foam artificial boulder. Each offers the physical interface for person and thing to come together as a phenomenological experiment to coexist in the built environment. The furniture provides an opportunity to subvert the power structures of art institutions through public interactive sculpture. I have exhibited this work in San Francisco at Minnesota Street Project, Root Division, and Embark Gallery, where I activated these pieces through performance to demonstrate a new social form by enacting companionship and nurture as the mechanic to destabilize pre-existing power structures. In my paper, Defixus Anima: The Ecology of Aesthetic Relations and Companionship, I work to estrange objects from a history of use and abuse by renaming them and thus reassigning their function. Their new title rejects ideas of speciesism to legitimize objects in a new form. By dismantling the presuppositional construct of objects, a shift is generated that reformulates the understanding of humans, objects, and their associative rights. Human rights are tethered to the equity of the object, making the handling of objects imperative.
Hands-Free Spoon, Joint Ventures, performance, 2023.
In my two-person collective, Joint Ventures, we co-author object-based performances. These abject and dada-like performances are used to critique the consumerist society that estranges us from our bodies and each other. It points to the ceaseless optimization of products to have something new to sell without real improvement to design, repackaging the old as new in a wasteful cycle. The Hands-Free Spoon performance exemplified a two-person shared experience with an intentionally clunky, over-optimized object (hands-free spoon apparatus) and a performance of the rapid messy consumption of a can of soup in under a minute to illustrate the sheer idiocracy of redesigning a spoon to be a large hands-free contraption. The Two Person Tampon is a performance where physical proximity becomes a vehicle for embodied connection. Referencing the vernacular of menstrual products, the string that tethers us to each other challenges the separateness imposed by bio-phobic design. The series of interactions illuminate the possibilities for new relational architectures rooted in play, reciprocity, and mutual consideration. A deep longing for togetherness exacerbated after a period of extended isolation (pandemic) called us to question how we might use objects to facilitate connection with our bodies, with the cycles of nature, and with each other. Creating opportunities for rest, gathering, and practicing togetherness provides moments of respite from the industrial capitalist agenda that keeps people trapped in isolation.
If objects can be liberated from use and abuse, so can people. By reorienting how we view objects, we may be less inclined to misuse them and may redesign Western thought to address the grand issues of social justice in the contemporary.