Body Like A Cage (2021)
This piece was created during a week-long artist residency called SoloLab 545 at VisArts (Rockville, MD) in December 2020. For this residency, I was invited to use a gallery space to create a work of art that incorporated performance as a medium. In this short video performance, I reflect on my experience living with scoliosis, how this spine deformity affected me as a girl and woman, and some of the fears around what my life would be like after the corrective surgery.
The set itself is densely packed with materials of significance: drawings/embroideries on the wall that depict still-images from my spinal fusion surgery; an old ballet costume from childhood hanging next to a model spine; a full length mirror which is used in the performance to continually check my body, and which at various times throughout the performance references the future or past; extruded ceramic sculptures, which are painted red and textured to look like bloody, twisted bones. Additionally, a circle of drawn charcoal visually displays the physical limitations of my body after the surgery. Within the charcoal circle, fragments of documentation appear and disappear as I reflect on distant and more recent memories of feeling trapped in my physical body, which has always felt like a cage of its own.
Body Like A Cage
2021
Single channel video
5 min 51 sec
The set itself is densely packed with materials of significance: drawings/embroideries on the wall that depict still-images from my spinal fusion surgery; an old ballet costume from childhood hanging next to a model spine; a full length mirror which is used in the performance to continually check my body, and which at various times throughout the performance references the future or past; extruded ceramic sculptures, which are painted red and textured to look like bloody, twisted bones. Additionally, a circle of drawn charcoal visually displays the physical limitations of my body after the surgery. Within the charcoal circle, fragments of documentation appear and disappear as I reflect on distant and more recent memories of feeling trapped in my physical body, which has always felt like a cage of its own.
Body Like A Cage
2021
Single channel video
5 min 51 sec