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Jillian Crochet in /digital room/

Note by Guest Juror Dorothy Santos
Crochet’s work asks us to think about what it means to be embodied and to have our bodies mediated through technology, both analog and digital. Her work highlights the ways we have disengaged with touch, a reality made all the more apparent in our biopolitical moment. When we are asked to social distance and not be in touch, in a literal way, her work pushes us to ask what it also means to feel. Most importantly, her work places special focus on the disabled and differently-abled bodies, which is vital to our humanity if we are to survive.

Artist Bio
Jillian Crochet is a Bay Area artist from the Gulf Coast working in sculpture, video, and performance. Her sculptures use haptic and embodied aesthetics to challenge the hierarchy of the senses. Her practice questions the medical model, desire for control, and the complex ethics of genetics and experimentation. Familial artifacts, found objects, luscious textiles, medical supplies, and natural elements become haunting amorphous surrogates to explore disability and grief. The unceasing work of self-advocacy led her to explore performance art. Her practice seeks to liberate the disabled body from normalized marginalization and oppression. She earned her BFA from the University of Alabama in 2007 and an MFA in Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in May 2020.
She has shown her work in Oakland and San Francisco and widely in the Gulf Coast, such as the Mobile Art Council, the Mobile Museum of Art, the OHR-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Mississippi. Her sculptures were commissioned as awards for the Morris Dees Justice Award by the Morris Dees Poverty Law Center.