Hot Crop
October 28, 2022 - January 8, 2023
VisArts Gallery, Rockville, MD
Using various light and heating sources, interdisciplinary sculpture, and tight cropped performances for the camera, Hot Crop is an exercise in the purity of technical failure and in the contradictions embedded in the language of identity. The room itself attempts a loop, the cooling hum of fans performing alongside the heat and the objects in the room.
Tanning lights attempt to change a tile, a heat lamp ventures to “fire” unfired ceramic bowls; on surreptitiously installed TV screens are performances for the camera conceived with hypothetical audiences and metaphors that exaggerate their absurdity: perhaps on the other side of the camera is 12th century Iranian poet Hafez; hyperbolic Rumi poetry is distilled into abject sculptural assemblages.
Who is the audience for our failures, and what do those failures teach us? How does the meaning of an image or thought change when it is in part cropped? What can we decipher and what do we mythologize around these cropped understandings?
Hot Crop settles into narratives embedded in our identities and plays with the intertwined constructs of language, utility and legibility. Hot Crop intimately targets the tenderness of my own identities; it combines ancient storytelling, personal narrative and abstraction, hybridizing and toying with them through the specificity of materials like fans, heat bulbs, hand made ceramics, a phone, a tongue.
