Which Side Are You On, Now? Tell Me, Which Side Are You On?

For several years, I have worked with the Campus Cuties as mutable figures through which I explore how ideals, behavior, and authority are shaped and sustained within larger cultural systems. Across my practice, these figures appear in shifting forms and materials, allowing them to move between roles—as ornament, symbol, participant, and support—rather than remain fixed representations.

In Which Side Are You On?, the Campus Cuties are mounted atop classical-style columns, each crowned with a lighted wick protruding from their heads. The installation draws on the visual language of Caryatids—women rendered as architectural supports—to consider how individuals can come to uphold the very structures that limit them. Here, elevation does not equate to power; instead, it suggests endurance, proximity, and the cost of remaining upright within inherited frameworks.

The work took shape during a period of social instability and prolonged uncertainty, as public trust, collective responsibility, and democratic norms felt increasingly strained. The burning candles introduce a slow, visible transformation: wax softens, drips, and collapses over time. Fire becomes both witness and agent—offering illumination while signaling depletion, vigilance alongside fatigue.

Which Side Are You On? invites viewers to sit with ambiguity rather than resolution. As the figures continue to burn, the work asks whether we are observing collapse, complicity, persistence, or the possibility of change—and what it means to remain standing as the structures around us shift.

Which side are you on now? Tell me, which side are you on?

Wax figures, columns. 2023-24.