| Failure lingers as a remnant of hopeful attempts and faithfully engaged endeavors. Given the hyper-cynical quality of our contemporary era, a nostalgic longing for that hope, found undiluted in the sincerity and certainty of the utopian goals offered by a Modernist Weltanschauung, becomes both increasingly desirable and increasingly fraught. The universalizing and colonizing impulses that accompany such idealized pursuits contribute to a troubling and complex understanding of failure, in which it must be both romanticized for its origins, confident in the possibility of success, as well as rejected for the compromised ends that had ultimately motivated its pursuits. My work as a mixed media and installation artist indulges in the guilty pleasures of romanticizing failure and idolizing drive for its own sake, but the high stakes attached to unromanticized failures, whose consequences are particularly disabling for marginalized people, tempers this idealization and creates a central tension in my work. |
