In my work, I use themes of obsessiveness, discomfort, angst, and rage. Through video, sound, installation, and performance, I carry out everyday routines and mundane tasks that sometimes reveal unexpected human physical vulnerabilities. My work is informed by my own traumatic experiences of the debilitating effects that mental disorders, for instance, experiences of anorexia, body dysmorphia, and borderline personality disorder, have had on the body and mind. I enact metaphors of discomfort that I experience as a woman every day through my personal everyday routines. In my thesis installation, I assembled a domestic bathroom in the MFA gallery using two used plastic shower curtains, along with metal shower curtain rods, a mirrored medicine cabinet, and a ceramic sink in order to engulf the audience into the cold-foul but familiar bathroom setting. That is where my earliest memories of what I felt like I should look like because of pressures of societal beauty standards took place– I remember sitting on the toilet and looking at the magazines propagandizing women's diet culture and skinny bodies. This is where I first learned at a very young age about makeup. Whether it was me sneaking into my mother's bathroom, rummaging through her drawers, watching friends and family putting on makeup, or glancing in the vanity and continuously body checking. My goal was to create a space that felt like a conglomeration of all the bathrooms where I have experienced this type of pressure in my life and the mess it has made in my mind. In this installation, I show a video on a 32-inch monitor placed in between two plastic shower curtains. The video is 5 min 9 seconds and is made up of 15 smaller clips on a loop, showcasing my personal bathroom routines, such as showering, shaving, applying makeup, brushing hair, and flossing, while also displaying aggressive tendencies such as hair pulling, destructive movements, and gagging. As one video begins, another video will appear either above, below, or zoomed in at random intervals. In the space, I display props from the videos, such as towels, a used toothbrush, razor, loofah, floss, countless ripped out pages from dieting books, and dirty makeup wipes, to help demonstrate this idea of being in a filthy, intimate - yet ominous bathroom setting, much like the ones I have grown up in from a young adolescent to adulthood. By using my body as a prop, I am able to manipulate the form to convey a sense of discomfort, angst, and obsessiveness as I smear, pinch, grab, and gag my own body. I encourage the audience to move freely within the space, opening the medicine cabinet and stepping onto the scale while also being aware of their own body. Website: darkgrayart.com Tags MCAD MFA 2024 MFA Thesis 2024