But if the Crime is Beautiful… Relics (2014)

But if the Crime is Beautiful… is a multi-media project comprised of ~70 photographs, wearable objects, sculptures, and installations, with series’ subtitled Composition with Ornament and Object, Hoods, Altared, Relics, Monstrance, and Strangers to the Garden. It references the architect Adolf Loos’ 1910 lecture Ornament and Crime, where he proposes that ornament is regressive, primitive and that, in (his) contemporary society, only criminals and degenerates are decorated (this includes women). Loos’ writings on architecture and functional art helped to define the principals of the Modern architecture and design movements. The influence of these movements permeates the contemporary built environment and therefore impacts our psychological and bodily relationship to space and objects. Through combining and covering iconic Modern furniture with the female body and gilded decorations, custom made garments, metal foliage, beading, and pearls it intends to question an art historic narrative that privileges a utopic, and myopic masculinist Eurocentric narrative. It also explores displays of power and oppression played out in the act of hooding or masking. Covering the face can be empowering or oppressive depending on the circumstances andI hope that my hoods are ambiguous in this regard. The hoods pull from a range of reference including executioner hoods, hoods used in historic medial images to mask the identity of patents, gimp masks, and the decorative covering placed on the relics of saints. This work utilizes a variety of craft media and techniques from a hood constructed of 11,000 hand beaded Swarovski pearls, to fold formed and cold connected brass halos, to 3000 photochemically etched brass leaves pressed manually on a hydraulic press over a 3D printed die.