Pants
Preparing is a performance-based work that begins with the simple, familiar act of putting on a pair of jeans—starting with ones that fit and moving to larger sizes, layer after layer, until the action becomes both absurd and futile.
What appears at first as an intimate, everyday gesture slowly transforms into a meditation on the roles we assume, the armor we build, and the limits of what we can carry. The work is rooted in personal experience—teaching my young son how to put on his own pants, and relearning the motion myself after an arthritis flare.
I considers how dressing the body becomes a daily negotiation between comfort and constraint, expectation and selfhood.
As the layers accumulate, denim shifts from garment to metaphor, evoking the weight of consumerism, cultural idioms (“who wears the pants,” “one leg at a time”), and the long history of jeans as both freedom and control. Preparing repurposes denim not into a new object but into a vehicle for reflection, turning material excess into emotional resonance.
