artist statement

Located at the intersections of digital fabrication, wearable technology, spatial media, and subversive pleasure, my transdisciplinary artwork invites viewers to re-imagine the body’s sensory and social relationships. I use these emerging art practices to construct anti-normative speculative bodies, participatory installations, and queer prosthetics that flirt with discipline and playfully resist biopolitical power. The artwork includes robotic appendages covered in fabric and sculptural forms that viewers can interact with and wear in the exhibition space. All these forms are embedded with digital micro-controllers, motors, speakers, and electronic sensors – and when connected to each other, they react through motion, sound, and vibration. I view all these objects, whether they’re worn by the viewers or affixed to the installation space, as a kind of queer prosthetic. These are prostheses that don’t assist with normal body function – instead, I view them as ways to imagine new speculative bodies that exist outside the normative biopolitical spectrum of gender, sexuality, and body type.

This work is the result of my current creative research into new media and emerging sculptural and social art practices that incorporate new technologies in digital fabrication, wearable electronics, and physical computing. Part of that research involves designing, engineering, and building studio.FAB, an open-source digital fabrication machine intended specifically for art-making. studio.FAB is not only a platform for conventional digital fabrication methods like 3D printing and CNC milling, it can also use traditional artist mediums like ink, graphite, and ceramics. An additional goal of this research is to find ways of streamlining and simplifying the technology so that artists and students can better access and use the digital fabrication process as an art medium.

As a transdisciplinary media artist, I work in the emerging areas of sculptural new media, installation, physical computing, soft circuitry, video, electronic music, and performance. In 2010, I received an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. In September 2011, I presented Pleasureware + Speculative Bodies, my first solo exhibition at The Cube gallery at the Visual Art Exchange in Raleigh, NC. Recent 2010 exhibitions include O.C.D. at Altered Esthetics gallery in Minneapolis, __TENSION at the Christina Ray gallery in New York, The Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, Imagining Desire at Gallery X in Louisville in 2009, and Zsa Zsa at The Loft in Charlotte in 2008. Currently, I work and teach in Charlotte, North Carolina.