Visualizing (2023)
These text-driven, maquette-like drawings visualize ideas in which architecture, design, psychology and social engineering overlap. Scenarios are envisioned from both an idiosyncratically-designed future and present moment in response to the male-dominated history of architecture described in architecture historian Kenneth Frampton’s 1300-page tome, Modern Architecture, to neurologist Sigmund Freud’s ideas about unconscious desire and to theorist Edward Bernays’ (Freud’s nephew) focus on controlling human behavior for corporate interests.
Also influential to this body of work are the descriptions of wellness cults and cultures in linguist Amanda Montell’s book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, as well as the psychological suppression and mycelia-infested mansion described in author Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel, Mexican Gothic. The drawings respond, through a feminist lens, to these sources and focus with humor and criticality on both the spiritual and mental health needs of individuals as well as the potential for social engineering to control built environments (for better or for worse) in an era of increasing climate, economic and social instability.
The narrative, in the form of hand-drafted text in each drawing, gives content and context to each drawing’s visuals which are semi-abstract and often suggest aerial and elevation views of floorplans, the shapes of objects and other diagrammatic elements. Perpendicular dimensional paper tabs protrude from the surface of each drawing’s surface, suggesting walls and other types of boundaries. Some pairings of texts and visuals intentionally don’t quite match up, or they purposefully match up too well in an over-redundant and ridiculous way. Often, something is revealed in the visuals that is not mentioned in the text, and vice versa.
