effie bowen

Artist Statement

I make sculpture, performance, and works on paper that disrupt routine objects to expose their conceptual underpinnings. As I attune to how material and social phenomena enforce obedience, my work corrupts objects like dog bowls or pacifiers to interrogate the slippage between care and control. By looking at turning points in development and dynamics of domestication, I examine how training confines behaviors into predictable registers. As I render objects like “anti-theft” mirrors or tape measures ineffectual at their proposed duty, I confront my academic and psychiatric institutionalization, promoting absurdity where there ought to be order.
My material interventions pervert use and value norms, promoting a queer methodology towards commodities and comportment. I scratch, grind, and bind leaving gestural traces of tension and pressure on found objects. As I address objects and scenarios which confine behavior, I riff with and against the manufactured world, materializing pieces that turn common things into quotidian abstractions. I defamiliarize forms like muzzles, mirrors, and dog bowls through collage, appropriation, and amendment. With these efforts, I make the recognizable absurd; disrupting it by way of exaggeration, scale, or repetition. Simple geometric shapes like tubes, rods, and spheres become remixed into perverse arrangements that hail the erotic and deviant through relational pairing and placement.
My practice confronts the relics of contemporary life, emphasizing how the body’s inconvenience inspires tools for subjugation. By interrupting consumerist objects engineered to inhibit, support, or restrain, I complicate dichotomous power relations, using ambiguity, word play, and incongruity to confuse lines of division. I reveal and revel in the in-between with a desire not to, as Lauren Berlant states, “lose an object but..loosen it.” My work is an anti-fantasy playfully interrogating the man-made world’s complications and contradictions. Nothing is expelled, rather, things are remixed and rearranged within a theater of contingent connections; It isn’t a new world, it’s just a new way to see.