Early Work: Is this precious yet?
This archive spans work from undergraduate study at Sam Houston State University through graduate work at the University of Houston. The inquiry looks different here: smaller in scale, more object-based, more interested in kitsch and the absurd. But the questions are the same ones.
What makes one thing garbage and another treasure? What gets put under glass, and what gets thrown away? These works approach those questions through found and altered objects, scale, and the particular human habit of dressing things up to make them easier to look at. The cicada shells in fairy tale costumes and the descending series of trash bags are early versions of an argument the current work is still making: that the act of display is never neutral, and that what we choose to preserve tells us more about ourselves than about the thing being preserved.
What makes one thing garbage and another treasure? What gets put under glass, and what gets thrown away? These works approach those questions through found and altered objects, scale, and the particular human habit of dressing things up to make them easier to look at. The cicada shells in fairy tale costumes and the descending series of trash bags are early versions of an argument the current work is still making: that the act of display is never neutral, and that what we choose to preserve tells us more about ourselves than about the thing being preserved.
2017-2020