Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibtion @ the Urban Arts Space, Columbus Ohio

The Mirage and the Rainbow

This Embrace 

Digital Image, Cardboard, Concrete, Cinderblocks

2014 

http://vimeo.com/89367035  

            I grew up in a mobile home park. Mobile home neighborhoods build and decay simultaneously; one day there is a house and the next an empty lot with cinderblocks and debris. Digital images, cardboard, and concrete are materials that have become essential to my practice. These relate back to my makeshift home with its cheap construction and quick fixes. I see the cinderblock as a foundation, both literal in the way it holds up a home and as a metaphorical replacement for the legs that hold up our bodies.

            Cardboard is a cheap, accessible material that is durable yet short lived like a mobile home. The cardboard cutouts are my way of building a stage to display the relationship between my physical presence and the perversions of my psyche. I have digitally altered photos of my self in the nude, removing all traces of my sex. In this fragmented and sexless form, my figure assumes an androgynous appearance. The pose that I have selected for this work suggests traditional representations of the female body in visual culture and challenges their meaning. Each one of these figures becomes a new entity that I can then interact with to explore my body and what it means to be a woman.  

 

 

 

  

Around the studio

22nd Annual Fergus Scholarship Award Exhibition

Exhibition Date: Saturday, January 11, 2014 - Thursday, January 30, 2014

Reception: Saturday, January 25, 2014, 5-7PM

Exhibition view

Taped Figure / 8'10"x 7'8"/ Digital print, board

Blanket / 2'x4' / Digital Print, tar

Lawn Chair / Concrete, Chair

Leg / 15'x 36" / Concrete, wood

 

The next generation of the figures in space.

Standing Figures - with Jacci Delaney and Zac Weinberg

Standing Figures- with Michael Mercil

3RD YEAR - of graduate school.

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My current research consists of deconstructing sex and gender.  I’m innately curious about sexual orientation and whether or not this is a given or something achieved through life experience. Through my own gaze as a woman I’m conducting artistic experiments through digital representation of my body.

            Gender is a type of “doing, “ as Judith Butler states it. There are many questions I’m rooting through such as, what does gender want? Does gender exist because of social norms? Does the outside world determine oneself? What is the materiality of the body? I strive to Challenge the norms of sexuality and gender through abjection and psychosis. Can I delegitimize “sex”? The ways in which I’m approaching this subject is by stripping the body of gender clues and denying them norms of our society. The images are larger than life with the largest figure standing at 8 feet tall.  This puts the gaze higher setting the figure in the position of power. The figures eyes stare back at you with intensity. I’m interested not specifically in the “male gaze”, or the “female gaze”, but questioning what is my “self gaze.” 

Summer Work- It's that Hunty Hunt

This is a new direction that I'm taking by using my image in addition to other materials and collaging them together. Better images to come...

 

 

Specific Tasks

This is a collaborative video/performance by both myself and Kristen Coburn. The title is Specific Tasks because we had two separate scores:

Kristen: Do work

Amy: Fill it

These scores were our only limitation and the video was born out of those restrictions.

Materials used: 25lb bags of flour, random tools, glass bottles and jars.

Here is a link to the video, but its best displayed the way it looks in the picture below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTkVwHajUv8 

Installation view

Video still

  

Video still

Post-performance images