In Herman Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund, the protagonist, Goldmund, discovers his humanity and empathy through fish. Goldmund is at a market; he looks at the fish offered for sale. Why are people so numb and crude, so insensitive? Why didn't they see the mouths of these fish in pain, their deathly frightened eyes? These people saw nothing, knew nothing, nothing touched them. I have continued to lean into this theme of someone shifting their ideology and figuring out how to respect and empathize with “the other” through fish. At Skowhegan, I began focusing on real and imagined fish care. One project involved a contractual agreement archiving visits to measure the pH of the local Wesserrunsett lake to ensure optimal conditions for the resident fish and sculptural work, where I “unhooked” the fish bait, gave them shoes, and spray painted them bright gold. 

Much of my Skowhegan work was derived from thinking about a popular bachelor party banner sold on Amazon that reads in gold shining letters, “SHE SAID NO STRIPPERS.” This 4-word statement creates a mythology, and within it, there is man, wife, and stripper. I was interested in the logic of it: STRIPPER = NOT WIFE, WIFE = NOT STRIPPER, BUT STRIPPER = POSSIBILITY OF WIFE? And that logic is embedded in my sculpture work; one sculpture is a golden wood chair entitled “SHE SAID NO SKRIPPERS.” Online censorship of sex workers results in us losing the accounts that make up our livelihoods; unable to use the tag “STRIPPER” on TikTok, we can use “SKRIPPER.”

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The videos at the bottom document the distribution of Walmart Returns packages to each Skowhegan resident, which I traveled with from NYC to Maine. [Walmart mistook my previous apartment for a returns center for approximately one year - I still have hundreds of packages even after slowly and ethically donating them and taking good care of them and installing them as free-to-take objects in my MFA thesis installation. I've asked others to take good care of them.