Brittany Mojo

Interested in functional objects as facilitators of memory, I manipulate material to navigate the utility of service. Using the image of function as the armature for material exploration and installation, ideas consider the gendered experience in banality. Concerned with dichotomies and contradictions, the work confronts sculpture and craft, fine art and design and the nuanced concepts within. Inviting the viewer to examine the strange amid the familiar, the work draws nostalgia from the comfortable commonplace. The objects result in being platonic in nature—becoming screens for projection. They often offer material as content and hold an intimate relationship with the body.

I use material to investigate memory through simulacra. Objects like vessels, chairs, lamps, tools, bikes, and furniture are realized from materials that leave evidence of the hand. This material memory becomes an artifact of production; a record of time spent. The work is of time and labor, an investigation into the histories of gendered work. Reclaiming these processes as valid, questions value and aims to reconstruct rigid material hierarchies and gendered processes.

The installation is both physical and unreal, both bodily and cerebral—where the strange takes form at the intersection of familiarity and ambiguity. The installation determines intimacy between these objects, where each relationship oscillates between receiving and rejecting, between acknowledging and denying, and between celebration and mourning. Through familiarity, the viewer’s memory becomes implicated in the objects in the room while the body is addressed in all stages of production. A chair may hold the body, while a vessel may be the body—both capturing evidence of a body in material—both, within installation, addressing a body as takers of physical space.

The work is always in motion; individual objects are never expected to serve a singular purpose. They become much like the world that surrounds us: both anonymous and intensely personal.