Architecture of Desire
2025
2025
Architecture of Desire is composed of sets, props and costumes made from silicone and latex as a study of how desire is constructed, coded and packaged. Through using synthetic rubbers associated with performance, commodified pleasure and disposability, my work speaks to the kinds of gendered labor and performances that happen in private and public spaces.
Leg Avenue and Agent Provocateur are lingerie brands that exist on polar opposites of perceived/economic value systems. Agent Provocateur is a high-end lingerie brand that has long been a personal symbol of aspiration, so much so that I have their packaging saved and displayed in my bedroom. Creating boxes is my approach to set design architecture—to unbox is to enter. I take latex casts of my bedroom floor and doors and cut them to the exact dimensions of an Agent Provocateur box. I use custom cardboard boxes to mount the latex skins, or paint them to create facsimiles of lingerie packaging. These boxes act as a setting, storage, and pedestal for my floor sculptures to live in.
On the other hand, Leg Avenue sells cheap lingerie and Halloween costumes– unironically you would find them exclusively in sex shops or Halloween stores. The synthetic props and costumes in my work are carefully selected by real world jobs and tropes from popular culture and fantasy. This body of work derives from my personal experiences of working ‘pink collar jobs’—care oriented roles mostly fulfilled by women, like a personal assistant and a receptionist. I’m interested in how these jobs, often degrading and easily replaceable, become commodified fantasies through the performance of these identities.
While devils and witches are considered immoral deviations within many dominant power structures, they are also temporarily made palatable as sexualized Halloween costumes. Contemporary culture engages in “a form of ‘cultural necrophilia’, whereby historic wonders [...] such as ’the witch’ is [sic] resuscitated, repackaged, and remarketed to re-enchant consumption” (James, S., Cronin, J., & Patterson, A. (2022). A Hauntology of the Witch’s Re-Enchantment). This echoes in recent adaptations of the Wizard of Oz (1939) in Wicked (2024), but notably in Not the Wizard of Oz XXX (2013), a porn parody of the original. The most striking part about the video is that all the actors wear Halloween costume versions of the characters– a “sexy Dorothy” or “sexy witch”. Porn is the parody version of intimacy the same way Halloween is supposedly horror; both require performance and costuming to reframe the original narrative.
I’m interested in what we choose to keep and discard, and the values of desire attached to these commodified objects. My object-bodies bring out the overlooked and exploited human traces in fetishized tropes, roles, and products that pervade popular and consumer culture. The real horror in fantasy is when private desire bleeds into public domains, and audience expectations for the performance of pleasure turns into something rather unwanted and dangerous.