2022
ink, charcoal, graphite, chalk
on paper and canvas
Cuten recalls childhood nostalgia when warmth and care was abundent. Sianne Ngai writes about how cuteness while mostly associated with affection and love, can disguise hidden power structions. Cute things provoke a desire in us to protect, to care, or hug, sometimes the urge to consume a thing. They need to be protected and in the same way they are vulnerable and can be taken advantage of. The desire to be cared for mixed with a fear of being seen as lesser for it of is central to my experience being gendered. Girlhood is coated in all things colorful sparkly and fantastical. which i soaked up blissfully as a child. growing up and becoming increasingly unjustly infantilized and sexualized stoked a fire inside me. And caused me to temporarily abandon all things pink and sparkly. violence done to me lives as a memory inside of me.
As i moved into adulthood, I reclaimed these signifiers as girlhood as a emblem of what i have endured in the collective memory the horrors and the joys of being a girl. I seek to create things bubbly soft and cozy and harsh fiery and livid or tired and sad all at once to ruminate on this lived complexity. Reappropriating signifiers of cuteness is an attempt to explore and reassemble my understandings of myself drawing from cultural gender norms i was raised with in all its glory and body horror. I dream-draw new configurations.