Unbounded is a dissection of girlhood as both an experience and construct with no limits. Through a series of graphite drawings, a pastel drawing made from expired makeup, pearl sculptures, and a hovering textile installation, the exhibition utilizes specific emblems related to mainstream femininity and the experience of growing up in the early 2000’s. The imagery is infused with care, love, violence, and history. In some works, objects are depicted as melting or unraveling, with some free-floating among liquids in space. Other works explore reconstructed memories and rituals, where magical thinking is posed as a potential space for exercising autonomy over oneself and one’s life.

The hovering textile piece is constructed from a process of bathing fragments of tulle (also known as tutu fabric) in a mixture of acrylic fluids and gloss, then intuitively stitching/mending/piecing the layers of fabric together by hand. With stitches running through it like veins, the piece intends to evoke a bodily/spiritual presence floating in space. It is an effort to re-imagine female representation in a way that speaks to embodied experiences, while further exploring the idea of the body as an ephemeral, fluid, formless, multifaceted being.

In a time and place where one feels powerless to patriarchal systems of oppression, Unbounded as an exhibition chooses to embrace the idea of girlhood and womanhood as ever changing, ever expanding, complex, and sometimes contradictory. Within this notion, a sense of agency can be found. Wishful thinking and the pursuit (and struggle) to defy gravity becomes a metaphor for girls’ and women’s continual resistance against the rules, regulations, and baggage imposed by the patriarchal structures in which we exist.

March 20 - April 10, 2024 | The Art Garage, Studio B, Green Bay, WI