BENIGN NEGLECT
I work extensively with domestic cast-off material to make painting, collage, and installation-based work that typically deals with the ways that humans appropriate, represent, and assign meaning to other living organisms. At 67 Ludlow, I deployed a collection of vintage planters to point to the strange logic of a tradition that includes displaying plants in handheld vessels which are, themselves, made to look like animals. Rather than communicating anything about authentic nature, these planters--masquerading as animals--begin to demonstrate the ways that objects mediate and condition our preferences and attitudes about ourselves, nature, and the home. Though this particular collection comes to the LES from Central PA, it extends beyond the local to demonstrate the influence that mass-production has with the unique culture of any particular place.
This work was created for a two-person exhibition of the same title at 67 Ludlow, a literal underground gallery in Manhattan's LES, in collaboration with artist Genevieve Irwin and curator Selina Yunqing Lin in summer 2016.