Party/Monster
2025
Multimedia Installation
Exhibited at
FALSE CITY
Hartford Artspace Gallery, 2025
What looks like celebration can also be disintegration.
Party/Monster reconstructs a manic episode from 2020, translating lived experience into a fragmented, immersive environment. The work draws from an archive of self-documentation - photographs, videos, and digital traces produced during the episode, reassembled into a physical and psychological space.
Through textile, video, and sound, the installation collapses performance and internal reality, exposing the instability between what is seen and what is experienced.
During a manic episode in 2020, I compulsively documented my experience through photographs, screenshots, and video. This archive becomes the foundation of the work - not as documentation, but as material.
At the center of the installation is a hand-stitched quilt constructed from repurposed materials that required over 250 hours of labor. It functions as both archive and reconstruction.
A looping video and audio component introduces another perspective: a poem my mother wrote and recited, reflecting on the same period from the outside.
Installation View (1:30)
Documentation footage of Party/Monster, exhibited in FALSE CITY at Hartford Artspace
Video + Audio Loop (7:39)
A continuous loop combining personal documentation with spoken word by my mother. Featured video projection in Party/Monster
Party/Monster operates through duality: performance and collapse, spectacle and breakdown, internal experience and external perception. The title reflects this split - “party” as visibility, excess, and performance; “monster” as what is hidden, misread, or pathologized. The work does not attempt to reconcile these perspectives, but to hold them in tension.
Materials
Repurposed fabric, cotton, ink
Embroidery floss, beads
Cardboard, plastic, crepe paper streamers
Video and audio
Variable dimensions
