ARTIST STATEMENT:
Scroll::Fight, 2023
In a moment of danger, the response can be of fight. This can involve aggression, confrontation, or resistance. But it can also look like collecting evidence, sending an email to someone with power to help you, going public, finding community— anything that helps one towards empowerment. Towards poetic justice. 

 

Fighting has something to do with your hands, either it be physically pushing back or writing. In the painting, the scroll is covered with hands. Intertwining with each other. Pushing. Pulling. Gesturing. Holding. Writing. Cupping. Praying… all that hands have the ability to do.

 

Scroll::Flight, 2023
The flight response involves physically taking place from the incident of danger, an instinctive urge to escape. One can experience a heightened sense of anxiety, fear, and panic, enabling their body to ‘run.’ When individuals experience the flight response, they may feel overwhelmed by fear or anxiety and seek to avoid the threat by removing themselves from the situation. I believe this response is always a wise one, to remove oneself from danger to compress, reflect, process the incident before one launches into what one can do next.

 

In the painting, the scroll is covered in feet. The movement of these footprints hold distance and time and a coverage of many landscapes, cities, and countries. They move in run, in walk, in scroll. They fly. They process.


Scroll::Freeze, 2023
The freeze response is characterized by immobility. It is a moment of great stillness, a moment of paralysis in the face of danger. This response serves to defend oneself by becoming invisible, by silencing themselves because every other possible response can trigger the situation into something worse, to dissociate, to protect the senses, to camouflage, to appear less threatening. Boring. Without care. Detached.

 

The painting captures this by showcasing thighs painted in blue, that too with translucency with water as an agent. The scroll, in relation to the other ones, is relatively sparse, to showcase stillness, isolation, and detachment. The darker colored sharp ridges, that take the shape of ‘knives,’ are piercing through to indicate a sense of danger.


Scroll::Fawn, 2023
The fawn response is a term that describes a pattern of behavior where we seek to appease or to please others in order to avoid harm or conflict. In order to avoid danger, one becomes an individual who abides, smiles, laughs off, tries to find moments of approval and acceptance, accommodates… All to find safety in a situation where there is no other place to escape to. 

 

This scroll is the most floral, busiest, and features the face, an orange water streaking frame that doesn’t hold any features such as the eyes, ears, mouth etc. It is all erased in the presence of pleasing the preparator, where the individual has lost their own identity in light of the crisis they exist in. 

 

The floral quality of this piece (as well as all others) captures Miami and its landscape, the beauty that was loud, aggressive, invasive, full of loud peacocks and geckos, banyan trees that broke roads and houses etc. I was enamored by this beauty and overwhelmed by how it intermingled with cruelty.