Picking: 2019-Present
In this work, I draw from both my own chronic body struggles with a recurrent abscess, as well as the general cultural interest in online content such as educational surgery documentation, health-related click-bait pop-ups, and even pimple popping videos. Seeking out anonymized images online is often utilized in order to conceptualize what our own bodies may be experiencing or have experienced. I argue that what may sometimes be perceived as voyeuristic gawking at the bodily dysfunction and misfortune of others online can, rather, be a form of coping with and accepting the abject nature of our own bodies. The confounding popularity of pimple-popping videos can be understood by recognizing the collective catharsis and visceral reassurance that they provide viewers that it's normal for bodies to be, well, gross.
In my Picking series, I explore the skin as a landscape of evaluation, maintenance, and sometimes, obsessive and destructive "picking." In my "Picking" assemblage, I have isolated a number of skin “flaws” that are targeted in skincare rituals onto separate canvas "grafts," each serving as a bodily betrayal and source of anxiety and fixation.The dissections of the face into single zones is intended to highlight the de-familiarizing nature of scrutinizing oneself in a magnifying mirror. I am rendering the natural surface of a face as a geography of this self-evaluative space of beauty and flaws. Such flaws include various pimples, whiteheads, a blister, blackheads, and even a stye (a pimple that occurs on the eyelid.)
My Dermascapes interrogate the well-treaded trope of "body-as-landscape," but rather than using idealized natural forms to analogize similarly idealized, uncritical allusions to the human body (which are all too often female), I instead depict bodily landscapes in states of dysfunction and rupture.
The Picking series highlights an element that has always been unconsciously present in my work: catharsis. Where my past pieces in the Mask and Peel series played with concealing and revealing, this series emphasizes bringing matters to the surface, and expelling them.
In my Picking series, I explore the skin as a landscape of evaluation, maintenance, and sometimes, obsessive and destructive "picking." In my "Picking" assemblage, I have isolated a number of skin “flaws” that are targeted in skincare rituals onto separate canvas "grafts," each serving as a bodily betrayal and source of anxiety and fixation.The dissections of the face into single zones is intended to highlight the de-familiarizing nature of scrutinizing oneself in a magnifying mirror. I am rendering the natural surface of a face as a geography of this self-evaluative space of beauty and flaws. Such flaws include various pimples, whiteheads, a blister, blackheads, and even a stye (a pimple that occurs on the eyelid.)
My Dermascapes interrogate the well-treaded trope of "body-as-landscape," but rather than using idealized natural forms to analogize similarly idealized, uncritical allusions to the human body (which are all too often female), I instead depict bodily landscapes in states of dysfunction and rupture.
The Picking series highlights an element that has always been unconsciously present in my work: catharsis. Where my past pieces in the Mask and Peel series played with concealing and revealing, this series emphasizes bringing matters to the surface, and expelling them.
