Shirts and Skins

2005-2007

Series, various sizes, deconstructed cotton t-shirts

Cotton t-shirts, cut apart and deconstructed, has become my medium to explore how the individual has been swept

up in the aftermath of 9/11 and the conflicts in the middle east that have followed. Each t-shirt is kept as a whole, nothing is cut off or left out.  So the size, shape and color still evoke the original shirt and, by inference, the person who once wore it.  When pick-up basketball games choose up sides, one team pulls off their shirts while the other keeps theirs on, becoming, shirts and skins.  Here it takes on the "them or us" mentality of the war on terror. As a basketball playing girl, I was acutely aware of the outsiders stance, always a shirt. For those of us who want to live, work and play ourselves - individuality, in all its shades of meaning, faces a reckoning.