Married With Children…Or Not

2010-2011

Much of my work capitalizes on material specificity that may encourage feelings of nostalgia or personal experience. While many of the materials I employ tinker with issues of identity (specifically as they relate to being a woman in American culture), I enjoy tangling satire with seriousness. My work has highlighted beauty practices, bodily comfort, psychoanalysis, gendered stereotypes, and here it situates itself in the lap of matrimony and human breeding. The seven works in the project assembled under the title “Married with Children…Or Not” are a pondering of our culture’s expectation of heterosexual marriage and procreation as the norm.  

While I am unaccustomed to incorporating myself directly as subject matter, it is surely present in these works. I hope that my perspective of being an unmarried, heterosexual woman without children may satirically and humorously exemplify and question larger cultural phenomena. The work in the project investigates experiences I decidedly, and unapologetically, do not have. From a Super 8 film of a running bride to the oppressive nature of bridal fabrics, a wall of staring doll heads, or the burdensome weight of other marital symbols, “Married With Children…Or Not” aims to utilize aesthetics and humor to highlight our often contentious relationship with our own (sometimes conflicting) desires.