Picking + Dermascapes: 2019-Present
In this work, I draw from both my own chronic body struggles with a recurrent abscess, as well as the somewhat confounding viral interest in online content such as educational surgery documentation, wellness-related click-bait pop-ups, and 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 could be perceived as voyeuristic gawking at the bodily dysfunction and misfortune of others online can, rather, be a form of coping with and, eventually, accepting the abject nature of our own bodies. The popularity of pimple-popping videos can be understood through recognizing the collective catharsis and visceral reassurance that they, and media like them, 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 a stye (a pimple that occurs on the eyelid.)
My Dermascapes interrogate the well-tread 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 coded as female), I instead depict ambiguous bodily landscapes in states of dysfunction and rupture.
These bodies of work more directly address 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 a stye (a pimple that occurs on the eyelid.)
My Dermascapes interrogate the well-tread 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 coded as female), I instead depict ambiguous bodily landscapes in states of dysfunction and rupture.
These bodies of work more directly address 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.
