Is this who we’ve become?
In 2017, we began to hear disparaging rhetoric regarding refugees. All over the world we saw images of families fleeing war, famine, and persecution. Who could forget the image of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi whose body had washed up on the beach in Turkey.
I could only imagine how desperate a parent must be to feel that they only choice they had to protect themselves and their children was to board an overcrowded blow-up raft and travel over treacherous seas. And how could we demonize people for just trying to save the lives of their families? Is this who we had become?
The 1% Project
In 2020 a pandemic began to spread across the globe. Incredibly contagious as well as incredibly deadly, measures were put into place to protect people from this illness.
In the United States, this quickly became politicized. At first with people denying the virus. Then with strongly felt arguments for and against lockdowns, masks and vaccines. What should have been a time of coming together to decide on the best public health policies quickly turned into blaming and recriminations on both sides.
And what got lost in all of this was the incredible number of people who died. In the 3 years that the virus ripped across the country,
1,163,040 Americans died from Covid.
This piece is being created to mourn those deaths. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, friends and relatives lost someone. We as a nation need to remember this vast number of our fellow citizens who are no longer with us.
I also wanted people to be able to visual this number. So, I began to make small pieces. Each one to represent a person who had died. I quickly realized I could not make all 1,163,040 pieces. So, I decided to show 1% of those deaths. To ask viewers to image that we had 100 more pieces like this to truly show the total number of deaths.
I am in the process of attaching these small pieces to a large piece of fabric. I estimate when it is complete, it will be 30 foot long. It is currently half done.
Little Black Dress
In 2014, the United States Supreme Court ruled that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance coverage for contraception under the Affordable Care Act violated a federal law protecting religious freedom. The suit was brought to the Court by the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby craft stores. The result being that they were not required to offer their employees some forms of birth control if they felt this violated their religious freedom. The ruling felt like one more attack on a woman’s access to reproductive choice.
The arrows in this piece are made up of the actual Supreme Court ruling.
I was not put on this Earth to be invisible.
Millions of girls all over the world do not receive the same advantages as boys. They are denied access to education, forced into marriage as children, victims of sexual assault, less access to food and water than their male counterparts, etc. And in many places around the world, they have little recourse to change this. These girls feel invisible. Not valued by their societies. What must it be like to look at the images…or lack of images…of the women who came before you?
In each of these frames we see a faint, silhouette of a woman. An image of a person who is there but not there.
In the next war…
A game-show like wall displays letters ala Wheel of Fortune. The words are almost spelled out, but not quite. Yet their meaning is clear.
On either side of the wall are cut outs of soldier-like images saluting. Anyone standing in front of these images will be reflected into the image.
