Thick-skinned

“It felt natural to me, I had spent so long focused on photographing inside a particular home and as an extension I felt compelled to recreate that somehow. But that quickly became too mundane; I needed more in order to express myself. In addition to the houses I began to make dolls to live inside the houses and that satisfied the manipulation of latex. I moved on to start recreating bedrooms from the home I grew up in. These installations were the closest referral to my photographs. And each step forward in my sculpture/installations, I began to be able to see photos more clearly. I had to start relating the work to each other in hopes for a cohesive senior thesis exhibition.

My dad had recently pulled up a purple carpet from the bedroom I slept in for years and I felt it was important to be in my final installation. I laid it down underneath the selected photographs with in my shows space. While reminiscing on the times I spent playing dolls on that exact carpet I began to piece together a way to incorporate latex casts (I had made from molds of old toys whose bodies are disassembled and reattached onto a different cast toy part). The lingerie that had become an important character within the photographs, had acted as a sort of prop moving my mind in a different direction. I loved the material they were made out of and how the felt on my skin, I felt a strange desire to recreate them with use of latex. The flesh like objects on the carpet excited me but I felt as though there was a missing part. I brought my grandmothers wooden Singer sewing machine as a stitching together of the uncompleted doll parts, and placed on top was a latex dollhouse. I began to debate on weather or not a performance would work in the space. Yet with myself already so present in each photograph I decided against the idea. Rather I created a praying form in the corner with a hot wax blanket shaped around my body. Above the kneeling figure painted white walls were coming undone and underneath was a light purple, the same color of my childhood bedroom.” Thick-Skinned, Shi Tingo BFA Thesis, March 2015