Participants can experience a northeastern autumn in Florida’s hottest beach town. The “cash grab” booth contains a high-powered fan blowing autumn foliage as a participant inside tries to collect as many leaves as they can in a 30-second countdown. The sculpture invites viewers to participate in the spectacle of acquisition, while also inviting them to experience the child-like joy of jumping in autumn leaves. Based on her childhood memories of “cash grab” booths at carnivals, arcades, and children’s parties, the work is grounded in linguistic play—invoking the aphoristic refrain that “money doesn’t grow on trees.” Prepared Cash Grab Booth (Fall in Miami) continues Sellinger’s line of inquiry into the gap between how we often talk about “the economy”–at the scale of global finance–and its etymological roots in the Greek word for “household management” which exists at the scale of the individual and community. This role of the individual in economy and currency is often most evident in the performative spaces of arcades and carnivals. “Cash Grab” booths like the one on display, and games more broadly provide an early indoctrination to capitalism. Quarters are exchanged for redemption tickets, to purchase cheap plastic toys and candy worth less than the quarter itself. In keeping with her work’s larger aims, the sculpture questions the myth of meritocracy and illustrates the ephemerality of currency as a medium of exchange.

This fountain is inspired by poet Aurora Levins Morales:

This time we're tied at the ankles.

We cannot cross until we carry each other,

all of us refugees, all of us prophets.

No more taking turns on history's wheel,

trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.

The sea will not open that way.

tablecloths, steel, women

Single motherhood has grown so common in America that today 80 percent of single-parent families are headed by single mothers — nearly a third live in poverty. This oversized work suit made of used table cloths imagines “unionized labor”—pun intended. In post-Roe America the economic consequences of childrearing—especially if unplanned, and the lack of social support, perpetuates the subjugation of women by forcing financial hardship.

chalkboard paint, wood, chalk, plastic, eraser

My cousin, a public school teacher in New York, was reprimanded by the principal for using the chalkboard because it was old technology. It is both funny and Orwellian that using our hands is no longer acceptable, as if hands are now considered vestigial organs and using them to communicate has become a radical transgression. By envisioning the body in conspiracy with the still object I resist the false capitalist narrative of perpetual (and technological) growth. The chalkboard will always be a chalkboard. As long as we have arms to reach and hands to write, it will always have utility. The chalkboard, in turn, will forever supply our hands and arms with the agency they deserve to rapidly disseminate information.

T-shirts, rope, hardware, sister

Hammock brings the body out of obsolescence and reimagines a new relationship between objects and the humans they are made to serve. My sister and I stand like pillars holding up either end of the hammock instead of the hammock supporting us—it’s intended purpose. The ropes on their own lack form, strength, or narrative. When looped upon itself repeatedly, such as in the hand-held game Cat's Cradle, the rope takes on endless structural capabilities and becomes a web able to shape and communicate new narratives. The suspension of implied support also suggests elements of interdependence beyond these materials and subjects.

t shirt, fabric, medical supplies

Everyone’s looking for a cure-all, a magic pill, and the best get-rich-quick scheme. The advertising industry goes to great lengths to appeal to that desire and increase sales through aesthetics. Our basic survival is not excluded from that process. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the disparity in the way we live became visible in the scramble to prepare for months of isolation. There was a sudden emergence of “glam-essential” items available to consumers. Creating this fetishized wearable first aid kits to combat these dire circumstances riffs on the fact that what is essential is always subject to how much someone is willing to pay for it.

All the contents of my fridge, disco balls, self

After a quarantine-inspired deep clean, I meticulously arranged the contents of the fridge into a staged theatre of sorts on the kitchen table. I hung a disco ball in my fridge and joined the party.

pencils

paper

video, performance, (horse: plaster, burlap, pvc)

While living in Richmond Virginia, I was struck by the monuments of confederate soldiers looming over the city. It felt so impossible then to take down these ingrained power structures not only around us but within ourselves. In the wake of George Floyd, the very monuments such as the one of Stonewall Jackson from which this project derives, are questioned, removed from public space, and even toppled over by guerilla protesters. Horse sculptures cannot gallop, win wars, or pull tractors. In the words of Jesus Benevente, “They are magical, but anachronistic animals that have been re-subjugated from beasts of burden into weird symbols of wealth and sexuality.”

lithograph on fabric, vinyl, air compressor 



A lithograph in the likeness of a quarter is printed on fabric and stuffed with an inflatable insert. An air compressor fills up the sculpture and throughout the day, the coin deflates. Credit theorists argue that a coin or dollar is not useful in itself and that the object is simply a promise to exchange something worth equal value. Essentially, the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one's trust in others.

two, one-hundred dollar bills

I wove two hundred dollar bills together, using a technique traditionally associated with women’s work. The warp and weft turned two hundred dollars into one hundred, decreasing the value by fifty percent—reversing the accepted model for an adequate profit margin.

empty package, clock mechanism

A box can contain both everything and nothing. They conflate space and time by transporting goods through the mail. The boxes go from being empty, flat, then expand into a cube, then filled, and then emptied and then made flat again to recycle. There is something magical about how much potential a box has are then broken down, and recycled.

drinking straws


the bendy straws interlock one into the next forming a winding closed circuit that cannot deliver a beverage to a wanting consumer.

vanilla soft-serve, milk crates, fishing waders, 1968 air-stream sovereign, 1920’s Byrd Theatre, woman singing La Vie En Rose with heart shaped helium balloon

An installation inside a 1968 thirty-foot airstream. The interior is stripped bare with the exception of milk crates, an absent figure, and a large projection on the far end of the trailer. Playing endlessly is a video showing an overflowing soft-serve ice cream machine on the stage of the historic 1920’s era Byrd Theatre, a time capsule of American grandeur. This subject on view, standing in the spotlight, spews gallons of ice cream onto the floor.

The idea for this project came from my childhood dream of starring in a remake of the film Paper Moon, co-starring Jim Carrey, who would play my swindling father figure. The video installation is part of an ongoing pursuit of this fantasy, which includes slipping Carrey a handwritten proposal at a book signing. I do want to embed myself in this fantasy, every aspect of it. I would love to grow up traveling cross-country with my father, conning townsfolk into buying used bibles. And, of course, I want to be Tatum O'Neal, who at the time was the youngest woman to win an Oscar for this role. And playing Jim Carrey’s bastard child (a bastard art collaborator child)? Yes please! But it’s all very self-aware. I’m a fan girl pursuing my childhood celebrity crush in a role where I have the power. There are political and economic issues at play in the scene where the little girl incessantly demands money from an older man—which parallels my asking a celebrity who dominated the cultural market of the 1990s to back my work. It’s very telling of the culture I grew up in, its concept of belief, and the way capitalist systems make something out of nothing. As the song goes:

It is only a paper moon

Sailing over a cardboard sea

But it wouldn’t be make-believe

If you believed in me.

folding table, absence



In Tourist I routed out a hole at face height into a standard folding table luring a viewer to insert themselves into a narrative, similar to the ones found at a theme park where the participant becomes a caricature for the sake of the photograph. I chose the folding table as the subject because of its lack of unique identity and that it is so frequently cloaked in a table cloth to suit the occasion.

fabric, steel, self

In an installation inside the attic of an old diner, there hangs a seven-foot tall T-shirt with silver collegiate lettering reading “I’M SINGLE!” This oversized gag tee that could be found at the boardwalk gift shop is characteristic of the pervasive stereotypes of single women. The shirt acts as an ostentatious display of one's availability when hung up, but loses its signaling function when worn. The text is then lost within the swath of fabric and the oversized T-shirt becomes a shroud.

acrylic on canvas, self

I have a particular interest in the body and how it relates to a space—its interaction with the physical world and its cultural environment. In Windsocks a large painting hangs on the wall with a windsock protruding from the center. Paired with the painting is a matching T-shirt I wear. Our windsocks channel the same wind direction, marking the symbiotic relationship of art and greater cultural trends.

silicone, fabric, self

This piece was created from the french comedy tradition of bouffonne, where the body becomes an exaggeration of itself, limiting and transforming one’s movement. There's something inherently funny about a clown whose shoes are too big. Walking in shoes that don’t fit is unwieldy. The sheer size of the shoe in comparison to the foot puts an absurd strain on the body that almost transforms it into an object of futility. Similarly, a second, inhibiting body that doesn’t fit is also a kind of reversal of classic images of Mary and Jesus in which one is holding the other; instead, I am a solitary figure enveloped by another body as overalls. It becomes unclear as to whom is bearing whom.

dough, self, other peoples hands

Investigating the similarities between flesh and clay, I directed several performers to squish and mold my face with their hands, creating involuntary expressions. Facial expression can act as a window to one’s emotions and this piece touches on the external and uncontrollable forces that affect our behavior. My face becomes a puppet for others to manipulate.

dough, self

I put dough on my face and as it sagged, I sang Sinead O’Connor’s cover of Prince's Nothing Compares 2 U, because I identify more with dough than a woman in the cultural context. The dough, acting as a mask, cannot retain its form or function due to its own weight. I imagine something more like Donna Haraway’s description of the figure in When Species Meet, in which she writes “Figures are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material–semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings co-shape one another. For me, figures have always been where the biological and literary or artistic come together with all of the force of lived reality. My body itself is just such a figure, literally.”

This piece is an homage to William Wegman's early work "Two Dogs and a Ball." In the original video the dog's gaze follows the movement of a ball behind the camera which dictates their movement. Mimicking the dance of the animals, I draw a correlation between a dog following a ball in a Pavlovian sense, and a human’s perpetual chase fixating on a perceived reward defined by convention.

synthetic foliage, foam, self

I fabricated a synthetic shrub to wear outside of suburban homes, posing as a manicured garden hedge concealing the privacy of the homes behind them. Investigating decor, societal perceptions of femininity, and symbols of class, this work also began a long investigation into ‘hiding’ within my sculptures.