Publications and Research
Document Type
Other
Publication Date
Winter 1-20-2024
Abstract
Taking Pictures is a large-scale ink-on-paper collage that was exhibited at Marshall University, West Virginia, in January 2024. The piece was shown as part of a series called All My Mansions.
All My Mansions is an installation of black and white ink collages that depict various virtual reality environments. Seductive in the way anything digital is – with its limitless space and time, and its unending promise of novelty – Decentraland, Second Life, and other platforms allow one to wander, build, chat, fight, buy, and sell. Some platforms have made stabs at utopian politics, while others are deeply immersive versions of video games. In VR we do what we do in real life, but dematerialized. While this dematerialization can be potentially liberating, it’s also a distraction from the messiness, and consequences, of embodied experience. The urgency of contemporary challenges seems to demand that we collectively turn towards our difficulties rather than away. My hand-drawn pieces drain some of the energy from VR by robbing it of its color, while at the same time they revel in its strategy of remixing.
