Taute (2023)
For my senior thesis exhibition, I created an interactive art exhibit. The piece began as a sociological investigation of how bodily shame was passed down from mother to daughter through the framework of Michel Foucault’s docile bodies. In the process, Taute became both a sociological exploration and an exploration of how to present my findings. In doing so, I pushed myself to show how academic information could be displayed in modes beyond a typical essay, granting the visitor agency and facilitating a personal connection to the work. Through the application of multimedia and space, my story and social theory became more relatable, engaging, and easy to understand.
To make the project more personal, I began by interviewing members of my family and used my own body as a subject in my artwork. By interviewing and recording my grandmother, my mother, and my sister I was able to portray their first-hand accounts of this trauma and how they relate to the issue of bodily shame.
I also took pictures of myself wearing or, well, trying to wear clothes passed down to me and that no longer fit me. I used the pictures as reference photos for drawings or replicated them using photo transfer methods. On one hand, it was therapeutic for me to use these clothes that no longer fit productively and positively. On the other hand, it allowed me to be vulnerable in this project. I was quite literally “stripping down” in front of my audience and showing them my unruly and no longer as taut body.
For the final product, I made a sculptural experience where people construct their narratives as they walk through. I took all of the printed, photographed, source, and academic materials I had and split them into different translucent frames. Each frame contained a different combination of text and imagery created through printmaking and drawing. With the help of many of my friends, I hung these frames from the exhibition gallery ceiling, so that if one walked through the installation the way I did, they would read the story’s progress as I had written it, with the hallway housing the introduction and each body paragraph consecutively following. However, I did not expect (nor want) people to experience my work solely in that manner. I wanted them to choose their own paths as they moved about the space. Depending on which route the visitor took, they read and interpreted the story differently. Some visitors viewed frames chronologically, while others forged their own journeys. Some skipped frames when the font was too small for them to read easily or others blocked access. Some saw images of one frame through another frame, making a connection where I never thought one existed.
To add another layer to this experience, I cut together pieces of the audio interviews I conducted and played them aloud in the room. Before this, I had primarily worked with two-dimensional print and digital art, with some three-dimensional projects in architecture and sculpture here and there. I had only worked a little with audio outside of video editing. Still, hearing the voices firsthand had an emotional and raw quality that added to the visitor's experience. By playing audio, the visitor can feel like they are hearing firsthand accounts, as if the source is speaking to them. Since this was a project about the generational effects of bodily shame, hearing women's voices from three generations carried more weight than just reading quotes or writing.