2025 Garage Door Gallery - Lake Tahoe, NV
At my first UNR residency, we were asked to perform in a short film and I felt a visceral panic at the thought of being put on screen. I broke down, sobbing in front of my new peers, unable to articulate why the idea of seeing myself on film was so unbearable. I tried to explain that what shows up on camera or in photos isn’t me. It’s something else, something unrecognizable like a stranger wearing my skin. This experience pushed me to dive into concepts of body dysmorphia, abjection, and the uncanny, but it also led me to something new: an understanding of the body double, the doppelgänger, the clone.
This work is a body that unpacks this feeling of estrangement with oneself, wrestling with the desire to resist patriarchal and capitalist beauty standards while still yearning to conform to them. This exhibition confronts the unsettling reality where the self is fractured and duplicated, inviting viewers to question the fragile boundary between what is real and what is perceived.
Using oversized fiber sculptures, video, and abstracted forms, I explore this tension through humor, dysmorphic imagery, and tenderness. This collection of sculptures transitions from clear and recognizable forms to more abstract and less familiar, yet still bodily. This abstraction is also reflected in the making of these works, tight stitches become loose strands as you move through the pieces in this exhibition. Most pieces in this show have been created using a 1960s Studio knitting machine. This process of knitting, mechanical yet still requiring considerable human intervention, is reflected in the stitchwork. Perfect stitches are intertwined with human error.
Trunk is a version of my leg, blown up to cartoonish proportions. Appendage extends the distortion of form, with its twisted tubes multiplying and merging into a single unruly mass. Twenty-Seven explores the concept of doppelgänger as a discarded form that reflects both abjection and care. The abstract wall hangings of Unravel are loose and sinewy but stuffed and overflowing with natural materials. In The Lady’s Dressing Room, a video contrasts moments of performative femininity, doing hair and makeup, with glimpses of the grotesque labor behind it: blood-filled sinks, unkempt makeup bags, and messy drawers. Together, these works confront the uncanny process of self-replication, where each clone, each unfamiliar part of self, is a distorted echo of the original, constructed through societal expectations and personal estrangement.
Through humor, tenderness, and absurdity, the exhibition asks: What if the reflection, the image, or the clone is as real as the body itself? This work doesn’t provide answers. It’s an open-ended investigation. It’s about inhabiting the contradictions of self-perception, identity, and the absurdity of the human body. I invite viewers to step into this exploration, not to solve it, but to question it alongside me.
