Artist Statement

Crushproof is a mindset, a mantra, and a proclamation of resilience. It is something you tell yourself until you believe it. It’s mostly talk and little action. It’s being wanted and anticipated and cushioned and sealed up and sent away and dropped and tossed and kicked and transported and opened and lost. It’s being terrified, but being patient and taking risks. It’s spelled out in the magnetic letters on your fridge. It’s a half-assed resignation from trying that you want to scream about from a mountain top and into your pillow. It’s doodled with a sparkly gel pen in the margins of your notebook and hand-embroidered into your underwear. It’s covered in Lisa Frank stickers and cherry scented. It’s about learning and going to the movies alone.

Crushproof is an installation exploring the past decade of my life, from age eleven to twenty-one. It revisits and reinterprets social trauma, naive yet formative relationship experience, and constant grappling with identity. More importantly, it explores the forced outward projection of identity that characterizes teenage experience- an uncompromising desire to be something, to stand for something, to want something.

Crushproof approaches these topics through a metaphor, comparing interpersonal relationships to the dynamics of mail and shipping. By recontextualizing the sterile, advertising-based text found in shipping supply catalogues, the project highlights the shared themes of trust, anticipation, desire, risk, damage, protection, and failure. By highlighting these similarities through this forced proclamation of strength, Crushproof emphasizes the overall fragility and naivety of identity during teenage years. The project draws from the drama, excess, obsessiveness, and playfulness of the typical teenage bedroom and visually references my middle school experience and the overall theatrics of adolescence.