MAKING BETTER CHOICES

Danny's box

What fraction below is shaded?

Mrs. Banner's Garden

Jake wants to measure the length, l, of the pond

Making Better Choices is a body of research-based artwork created over seven weeks. These works are built from a collection of mathematical word problems for grades 3-8 used in North Carolina standardized tests.

The math problems are used as prompts from which to build a set of potential responses. It remains unresolved, however, whether or not these responses are necessarily new “answers.” Making Better Choices points to tactical obliteration of normative solution by undoing the problem itself. The goal of this work is not a direct translation or simple addition of original form. Rather, word and math problem content is reformulated through critical and imaginative exposure, infection, breakage, and recovery as a liberatory model. If not liberation, at least an escape route.

As a series of models or proposals, the work never settles in one place, nor does it subscribe to fixed reality: it lives in the contradiction of concrete form and potential. Each work is captured from a logical/illogical mutation always on the way to new form.
As an arc of my work in the broadest sense, play, fun, and pleasure point to prescribed limits of democratic freedom. In conversation with the inherently disciplinary nature of standardized tests and education as a whole, Making Better Choices uses aesthetics of play to model a hijacking of state imagination.

Cheryl is Gay / Triangle Escape