Making A Way | Interruption
Artists: Jessica Dehen, Marley Foster, Hannah Nielsen, Alyssa Reiser Prince, Claire Whitehurst
Statement
In my studio practice, I work with domestic materials — fabrics and found furniture from the house in which I grew up — to explore tensions of the middle-class, suburban home and ideal of the nuclear family. My sculptures, in their reinvention of these objects-turned-materials, stake a new agency over my remembered history of growing up in suburban Texas.
The works treat familiar objects and furnishings as a suburban camouflage. Such interior spaces protect and comfort, but also confine and obfuscate those who inhabit them. I want the works to manipulate these familiar objects enough to expose the psychological underbelly of these domestic environments, questioning how we define our understanding of the home, the institution of family, Southern conservatism, class signifiers, and gendered labor.
Bio
My name is Marley Foster. I am an artist and writer, currently working as a Teaching Fellow and MFA Candidate at the University of Houston.
In my studio practice, I reconfigure domestic fabrics and objects of the very recent past in order to question the institutions of home and family as they relate to the American South, gendered labor, and more. I use my personal history as a child who grew up in Suburban Texas in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the entry point into these investigations.
In addition to my studio work, I write arts criticism (most recently for Houstonia magazine) covering local exhibitions, and have also recently published a piece on aesthetic theory and the environment (with the Green Theory and Praxis Journal).
marleyfoster.com
Instagram: @mar_workss
