Wiggle Room is an interdisciplinary installation installed in my Connecticut studio. The work is a display of three jello and mold-related art projects: Sonic Jello: a digitally responsive audio-vibration sculpture, with accompanying “Jello Talk” video; Smashmold: a didactic display of smashed molds with documentary video; and Wiggle System: a collection of domestic objects from a quarantine (self-care) jello project with related videos, “Wiggle4Me” and “Orange Gem.”
2020, Multimedia
Wiggle System is a five day pedagogic, jello performance project. The project was inspired (in part) by Tom Sachs’s TED talk about authenticity. Sachs says: “find your own sympathetic magic and make it function...Building the world the way I want it to be...using my internal standard of what this work can be.” Watching the TED talk, Sachs sparked my notion of authenticity and ideas surrounding internal standards. I asked myself, (in the midst of the pandemic) “what is authentic to me right now?” My answer came in the form of a self-care project called Wiggle System. I needed a way to build knowledge and develop a deeper relationship with jell-O, jell-O making, and the Sonic Jello sculpture. I began the (Wiggle System) project by creating an “Instructions List” to follow and explore. The list offered me a guide of jell-O making-shaking rules which resulted in chance actions and unknown outcomes. The “Instructions List” is based on five elements: #1 jello mold, #2 jello color, #3 stirring objects, #4 “Artist PPE”, and #5 music & sound. I prepared ziplock bags containing numbered “fortune directive slips,” and object bins, containing corresponding numbered objects (that matched the numbered fortune directive slips) The Wiggle System project lasted five days, May 2-May 6, 2020. Each day, I followed the “Instructions List” and went to work. This project focused and connected me to my artist self. It engaged me the multiple ways of jello; performance; and solo documentation.