HOMEBODY

Homebody is a multi-layered installation that exists simultaneously in two locations: Flint, MI and Hartford, CT. The physical installation inhabits the artist’s home in Flint, MI as an examination of amassing trauma from structural violence and its impact on the body politic through personal narrative. The video installation in Hartford, CT transmutes the voyeurism and consumption of personal storytelling, feminization of poverty, and the difficulty in performing domestic labor during crisis. On a macro level, Homebody is sited as museum, public art, and media source, subverting the cultural functions these institutions have played in maintaining structural violence in the larger civic discourse. On a micro level, Homebody investigates home as a metaphor for the body, manifesting the accumulation of memories, dreams, and traumas through the materiality of domestic, social, and art objects.

Each room of the house tells a specific story about the artist’s position as a woman, single-mother, activist, artist, and survivor. The lower level of the home explores her generational family history in Flint, the trauma of sexual assault, and the Flint Water Crisis. The upper level examines the numerous identities the artist performs as a woman, mother, and cultural producer. Homebody is an act of restorative justice for healing the fragmentation of the self despite the structural violence on the body politic.