New Comment

New Comment blurs binaries of on and offline, dreaming and waking, derogatory and empowering, trauma and healing, private and public. I repurpose harassing online messages, journal entries, and memories from my five-year cyberstalking experience into three sewn panels and ask viewers to witness. The phrases wielded against me in a pattern of abuse—“Feminazi,” “Lesbian Sex Fantasy,” and “Man Hating Bitch”—were intended to objectify, intimidate, and discourage me from speaking up.  Instead, they encourage me to speak up for myself and others.

For survivors of gender-based violence, there is rarely a simple path from violated to healed. Rather, healing manifests in layers of memory, trauma, love, sadness, fear, the imagined, and the material. The installation moves viewers between various emotions and interrupts them with the tri-tone bleep of a phone notification to complicate the healing narrative. Through purposefully revealing my private journal entries and publicly memorializing my grandma, I hope to reassert vulnerability and agency as a method of healing.