This ongoing body of work was made using an algorithm for branching. Written in Actionscript, the program has three options for each section of the branch: rotation, length, and how many branches to spawn. By repeating the algorithm a number of times determined by me based on the aesthetics of the output in realtime, I can create maps of randomness that are also a record of my decision to end the algorithm.

I then either choose to manipulate the finished files or leave them as they are created by the code alone. The prints are limited editions.

This project was a collaboration with students from Dan Roe’s Biological Form and Function class at Massachusetts College of Art and students from my Art for Social Change class at the Urbano Project. The students were given crayons and asked to chose either a color that represented their skin tone, or one that was a fantasy, like purple, or a color that was the opposite of what they identified with as their own skin tone.

They then carried out an exercise where they were asked to shave, break, peel and otherwise disassemble their crayon for ten minutes, or until they made the decision to stop. During this exercise they were to think about both the implications of the physical activity (shaving, peeling, breaking down) as well as to meditate on ideas of revealing, stripping bare, and unveiling in relation to skin tone versus identity. The students each wrote a paragraph about the experience which was displayed with their crayon remnants in the Arnheim Gallery, the Art Education gallery at Massachusetts College of Art.

This collaborative video sculpture with artist Sarah Rushford uses two identical video monitors set approximately five feet apart. The video, captured with a macro lens, is of my fingers tips breaking through water. Appearing refracted on the other video monitor, the fingers seem to reach through the empty space separating the monitors.

Proprioception is the sense that indicates where the various parts of the body are located in relation to each other and whether the body is currently moving with required effort. This piece uses video to extend the human limits of proprioception. In the video footage, the surface of water is broken and rebroken, and defintions of inside and outside, horizontal and vertical, are intentionally ambiguous. The space between the monitors becomes a refracting agent. It is activated, charged with undefined memory and potential phenomenon.

Proprioceptive Refraction from Sarah Rushford on Vimeo.

The series “Very Becoming,” an ongoing body of work, deals with the idea of interstitial identity. The works explore what is left behind during a process of transformation. Searching the Internet for key words like “female figure” and “woman outline,” I have collected hundreds of female silhouettes.

Using an animation program, I then morph these archetypal female silhouettes from one recognizable form to another. A sexy hip thrust silhouette turns to one of playful dance, a confident businesswoman (signified by high heels and a briefcase, of course) morphs to a pregnant figure. I then extract from these animations the part that is most interesting to me- the in-between stages. Sometimes remnants of the original figure remain, a high heeled foot or a face in profile, but mostly these computer interpreted interstitial frames become like Rorschach ink blots, shapeless and open to individual interpretation.

The wall sculpture consists of 17 pairs of girls’ shoes, in every size I have worn. The shoes face into and out of the wall, representing that middle ground where you are neither coming nor going, but always growing. Each shoe is planted with the herb Thyme, creating a play on words that time itself, in the form of the ever evolving human body, grows out of one’s shoes.

The bottles displayed with the sculpture are the remnants of all the items used in creating the installation as well as the other pieces in this body of work, all from the two person show “Incidents & Reflections” with Tim Murdoch at Schiltkamp Gallery. Other pieces included The Safety of Mountains, and a crayon and pencil drawing titled Map Me. By collecting the pieces that fall off, the throw-away ends and discardable detritus, I attempt to remember the details while still grasping the “big picture”.

Spanning the Rift is a tension bridge made with 75 pairs of reading glasses, rubber bands and chain. The glasses are attached front to back, representing the ability to see into the past while simultaneously looking to forward. This ability literally creates a “bridge” for safe travel into an uncertain future.

The Stratum Corneum is the term for our outermost layer of skin cells. The Stratum Disjunctum is the cells that are partially detached from the Corneum, already dead yet still partly clinging to the skin’s surface. This installation was created from 7000 packaging air pillows, which I inflated in the Arnheim Gallery at Massachusetts College of Art. It is 5 feet 5 inches tall- exactly my height, and is cordoned off by a thirty foot rope made from ten years of my own hair.

In the human forearm alone, approximately 1300 cells/cm² are shed per hour each day. Startum Disjunctum is a piece in which I attempt to hold fast to the pieces that fall off- as  identity becomes nebulous with each sluffing of skin and with each hair cut. I try to make sense of the conundrum I feel in being continuously physically reconstructed while my sense of self remains intact.

This is installation hung in the Midway Studios Lobby in downtown Boston for one month as part of a concurrent exhibition about food, curated by Krina Patel. I experimented with long curly chili peppers as a material, weaving them together with straight pins and weighting them down with tiny bags of water. The peppers underwent a transformation over the month, changing from green to yellow to brilliant red.

This installation was made at the Schiltkamp Gallery at Clark University. The bed is laser cut from an enlargement of a balsa wood punch-out dollhouse bed I had in my childhood. The negative and positive sides of the bed are placed together and literally hold each other upright. The middle of the installation was made from pieces of resin cast from a dimensional topographical map of the mountains in Maine where I was raised. Over 3000 cotton balls make up the clouds which suspend the resin mountains. The scale of the doll’s bed and the mountains are reversed, eliciting the idea that as an adult, things that seemed large and out of reach are now controllable, and that memory is a maleable contsruct.

A collaboration with Sarah Rushford, we spent one month in Melle Finelli Gallery constructing an installation of 250 gelatin capsules suspended at varying heights by monofilament, each anchored with a lead weight. Though the installation was not based on data, and instead on our aesthetic decisions, it carried connotations of a pre-determined data set, a flocking or grouping pattern, and a musical score. The title They Believed Every Word was scattered throughout the installation inside several of the capsules.

When the installation was complete, we carried out scientific methods of investigation in order to analyze our data set, including drawings, experiments, and collections – which were displayed in the gallery as accompanying works of art.

“They Believed Every Word” is the first part of the idiom that ends with “Hook, Line and Sinker”- which references both the lead sinkers and fishing lines used in the piece as well as the concept of constructing nonsensical scientific investigations that are believed to be valid.

As part of the Art All State Youth Arts Program at Worcester Art Museum, I was invited to create an installation at the museum. The Art All State Program is a 36 hour intensive installation art marathon, based on two works selected from the Worcester Art Musuem by AAS Faculty. The students were also given two sculptural materials also selected by AAS Faculty, and both faculty and students were supplied with a “surprise” material upon starting the program.

For the installation Five Hours of Decisions, I chose to also limit my materials to three: nylon stockings, thread and T-pins. I had no plan and no premeditated intentions.