Staging Area

For a time, I was fascinated with the “ghosts” that lurk inside a home— emotions and memories that may linger long after the residents are gone. In the “Passthrough” works, I thought a lot about the trauma that may come from the experience of war, either as a combatant or a civilian. My previous bodies of work had typically explored the intersection of domesticity and destruction, albeit with a surreal twist, like a half-remembered dream. The “Pass-through” works layered the desolation of post-war landscapes atop mundane American settings to arrive at an unsettling liminal state. “Pass-through” is an architectural term, an opening between two rooms such as from a kitchen to a dining space. Built as they are inside of walls, the works literally bring war into the home—with the wall serving as a conduit for the experiences and traumas of those touched by war.  The “Reliquary” pieces are the first I made in this exploration, embedding tiny figures of injured/deceased soldiers in walls behind a jeweler’s loupe, resulting in a distorted, ghostly image.