Karen // 2022 🛋️🧸💔 - Meet Karen, an anthropomorphic couch standing five feet tall. She is a chaotic amalgamation of memory and matter, a humanoid structure built from the literal fabric of a Midwestern home. Her body is composed of found objects, deconstructed childhood toys, religious paraphernalia, pieces of floral couch, and a wooden understructure holding it all together. She is a monument not to a pristine memory, but to the complicated and layered reality of growing up in the Chicago suburbs, embodying the physical and emotional textures of that specific time and place. But Karen is more than just a collection of objects; she is a critique. She personifies the profound dissonance between the idyllic facade of suburban life and its uncomfortable, often ignored, truths. She confronts all that is wrong and disquieting: the quiet but constant undertone of religion, the insidious misogyny and racism hiding in plain sight, the immense pressure to blend in, the strange anonymity of c...