The trajectory of this project comes from a long-standing interest in understanding how it means to experience art as a body. through__looking__ takes at its heart a consideration of embodied spatial memory and the body of the viewer as they experience and perceive space. The installation explores the ways windows reflect and control interior experiences: not only through allowing light to enter, but also through observing time and its physical shape. My conviction in this project comes from the way that a single window can shape and figure the way that we come to understand the passing of time.

The installation takes place in two parts. The first part, through__looking__, is a sculptural installation in the gallery composed of two windows embedded within a wall, with a rear projection involving live feed from my home in New Jersey streaming through a set of venetian blinds fabricated from glass. Fabricating glass blinds subverts their functionality twofold by making raising and lowering the blinds precarious, and by failing to keep light out. Glass blinds simultaneously envelop the viewer in an immersive environment of refracted light, inviting and warning the viewer to raise the blinds. It is this immersion and deflection that embody the viewer as both separated from and reflected within the space.

The second part, alterpiece, is a video installation that takes the form of a triptych, formed primarily by footage spanning the spring and fall of 2014 from my home in New Jersey, following the decline and passing of my grandmother, Amei Hsu. The video is comprised of many moving and still shots in varying degrees of zoom and focus, taken with unsteady hands by a body often in motion. These shots are taken spontaneously and without prior staging or planning, collected footage taken from my daily life. Immediacy remains a necessary component of my practice. Yet it remains of utmost importance that I use my own footage as this footage thusly retains familiarity in its specificity.

My research process also considers closely what it means to make art, in part a process of self-examination, considering closely arts relationship to the words praxis and poiesis. through__looking__ presents my subjective and personal point of view grounded by my theoretical practice, my understandings of embodiment and personal politics.