The Bathroom Series
The Bathroom Series
“The Bathroom Series” explores the private space where one (hopefully) practices basic hygiene. The quotidian routines we perform in this space are seldom witnessed by others, except perhaps for one’s family, making them unconventional sights for public eyes. Since these actions are performed habitually every day, we generally do not give them our full attention, let alone know what we look like when we do them (or even consider if there is a different method). The bathroom is the one room in our homes where we can expect to be alone when we occupy it, yet it is simultaneously shared with the people we live with. I enjoy exploring the tension between the private and public nature of this space. In highlighting these acts of cleanliness (and other things we do in the bathroom, like look at ourselves in the mirror and check our phones), I hope to promote questions about what it means to literally and metaphorically clean our bodies, and how our relationship between our bodies and minds transform when we are in this space.
“The Bathroom Series” explores the private space where one (hopefully) practices basic hygiene. The quotidian routines we perform in this space are seldom witnessed by others, except perhaps for one’s family, making them unconventional sights for public eyes. Since these actions are performed habitually every day, we generally do not give them our full attention, let alone know what we look like when we do them (or even consider if there is a different method). The bathroom is the one room in our homes where we can expect to be alone when we occupy it, yet it is simultaneously shared with the people we live with. I enjoy exploring the tension between the private and public nature of this space. In highlighting these acts of cleanliness (and other things we do in the bathroom, like look at ourselves in the mirror and check our phones), I hope to promote questions about what it means to literally and metaphorically clean our bodies, and how our relationship between our bodies and minds transform when we are in this space.
Thesis Work
I became interested in working with my family’s film photographs precisely because they are a physical reminder of when they were made. The medium itself speaks to a very specific time when family photographs (mine and others’) were shared as physical prints and in albums rather than through the digital platforms of social media. The sharing of a photo album was an intimate and revealing occurrence rather than a casual public event – you didn’t share your family albums with strangers because you generally did not invite strangers into your home.
It may seem contradictory that I choose to make paintings — paintings that I hope to show in public — based on my family’s private archive of photographs and my personal ones. Yet I find that I make more interesting work using images of people I know and love rather than strangers. Starting from the highly personal has paradoxically enabled me to speak more broadly about learning to live with emotional scars and burdens. Thus painting these images and sharing the resulting artwork has become both a public and private act, as if a door was ajar at a vulnerable, revealing moment.
Homeland
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