How To Let Go

How To Let Go was my undergraduate thesis exhibition at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in March 2019. It was a culmination of work I produced throughout my senior year for my painting and sculpture double major, resulting in an installation that featured video, printmaking, drawing, oil painting, wire sculpture, and poetry. Exploring themes of love, loss, translation, and transformation, I became interested in creating invisible paintings, something a viewer could almost miss if they were not looking closely enough.

After much experimentation, I landed on two techniques: painting with interference pigments that can only be seen in certain lighting conditions and engraving styrene to make drypoint plates that project their shadow on the wall like a graphite drawing. Interspersed between the paintings were excerpts from love poems handwritten on the wall. Wrapping around three sides of the room was a wire fence made of steel and brass armature wire. The brass wires terminated at the hands of some drawn figures that anchored the video pieces. Two videos cycled back and forth: Love You/Love Me combined lines of poetry and an imaginary dating profile, and Starting From The Middle explores the cyclical nature of growth. In the center of the room was a stack of zines that visitors were welcome to look at or take with them that included related writings and ephemera.

This exhibition formed the model for almost every future project; my process has continued to look like research followed by a period of experimentation, then the creation of a large body of work that I imagine functioning together as an installation.