Artist’s Alter Ego: Ripn Btch Photograph by Jessica Hubbard Marr

Artist Statement

As a garment-centric interdisciplinary artist, my work centers around three concepts I have constructed: sartorial sabotage, schmatte prowess, and feminist chutzpah, all of which locate my practice within a framework based on my gender, socioeconomic background, and Jewish cultural heritage. My work contextualizes the exploitation of land and labor through the rag business from personal, professional, and familial lived experiences as well as ancestral associations. I use salvaged clothes, which act as both subject and medium to address issues of slow violence prevalent in all aspects of mainstream textile and fashion production from seed to seam and beyond. Clothing acts as an indexical agent allowing us to read the textiles as a form of text, as an embodied material, and as a messenger carrying coded communication.

As an artist, I position myself as an activator and mediator. In doing so, the role of art and the artist are redefined to be verb-based rather than noun-based. In this way, my practice references actions taken such as casting spells or performances of prayer, thus eliminating the polemic role of the viewer from completing the work. Instead, art is understood to be the engagement between the artist and the material, each possessing their own agency in relation to one another. As such, art is the process of shifting energies that occurs during the act of making rather than the more common association with the completed object.

Additionally, through my work, I question the role of "maker" from a personal, political, and material perspective. When thinking about my relationship to “making” from a position of constructed race-based privilege, I find acts of “unmaking” to be more appropriate and relevant. In altering the physical structure of the material through “destructive” means, gestures of unmaking are enacted to imply new openings or the possibility of portals within the inequitable structures formed by hegemony. Furthermore, in recognition of an exploitive and unsustainable material world, I align my actions of unmaking with respect for all beings, animate and/or inanimate.