Screen Installations
This installation was created on Plum Island beach, Massachusetts, in August 2023 with painted window screens and my mother’s antique lace curtains and bamboo polls. This installation holds a lot of meaning for the place, which is in the town I grew up in, as well as for the materials and the time it was captured, on my last night in town while my children played in the surf with husband and my father sat behind and watched me lose time in my screens. Building structures, or anything, has never been easy for me as I struggle with direction and spatial awareness and an ability to understand some rather basic construction methods. Like in most things, I try to follow my own intuition. I wanted to bring screens that reminded me of childhood beach towels and a specific artwork I made with many overlapping, colorful sailboats. The lace hung in the windows as a child
The photographs below. were taken in Squamish in June 2023 with a variety of my painted screens being installed throughout our hike. This work is an attempt to return to memories of solitary childhood exploration in nature, now with new information about myself and what my childhood play meant. I spent hours and hours creating secret gardens, forts and glens, finding treasures and decorating my spaces, willing magic to real. When stuck inside as a child, I would stare out the window and let my eyes unfocus so the screen added a layer of blurring visual texture as I dazed out and escaped into my imaginary world. I am using window screen because it is a barrier between indoor and outdoor and I am repurposing it through activations with color, light, and shadow, using the screens to create a new type of liminal space in nature, one full of the magic and wonder I wanted as a child. When I am done with these installations, I use the screens for other works.
The series below was created and taken in an old friend’s yard in Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn, where we stayed when we returned east foir the first time since leaving New York in late 2017. During this trip, I brought several screens intended for installation in meaningful locations bnoth from childhood and into my adulthood. What I discovered in returning to New York is that we are not meant for that space. We are meant for spaces full of things we can pick up and carry in our pockets, where our shoes will touch many types of earth throughout the day, where crows are often the loudest thing to contend with. Each day we would venture into the city to show our kids where we started together, where they became real and an idea, and each day we would return, in complete sensory overload. They escaped to tablets and I to the back yard, where I worked each day for a precious hour or two until dinner time, immersing myself in as much quiet color as I could.
