Post-Capitalist, Feminist Toil

I was recently featured in a show in one of the School of Visual Arts galleries, where I am currently a student. The show, titled "Social" featured 7 artists, all current SVA students or alumni. When asked to write a short press release describing my work in plain language, I submitted the following:


Katie Cercone deifies and destroys lost expenditures. This is feminist, post-capitalist toil. Excavating at the threshold of cheese puff and pastel lawn chair abjection, she situates domestic baubles - toys, bed sheets, hair clips and food - into her personal, hypnotic rotation; exploiting their rapture value and relinquishing them of their original power.

Unfortunately, this registered as pure jargon to the curator. I stuck to my guns and refused to bring the axe down on my own practice. If someone was going to write about my work in a format that was accessible to the other side, it surely wasn't going to be me. Tell the public they can wash down that glass of peanut butter with a milk sandwich. The official press release for the show read as such:

With a keen eye for composition and color, Katie Cercone assembles discarded consumer products including toys, bed sheets, hair clips and food, creating wall sculptures that critique our bourgeois and patriarchal culture. Cercone is a student in the MFA Fine Arts Department.

At the risk of sounding like a rashly disillusioned and reactionary feminist politico, I'm going to point out that they replaced "Feminist" and "Post-Capitalist" with "Bourgeois" and "Patriarchal." Under the guise of making my jargon more intelligible, the new copy reframes my position in a way that reaffirms the status quo and blots out my utopic exclamation. Might I add that all written copy that is associated with the school and earns the SVA logo as it's seal is required to go through an unabashedly totalitarian communications department that edits the text and sees that it conforms to strict regulations concerning font and text size. When I sought confirmation of this from an SVA adjunct faculty member she remarked that the word "failure" was once edited out of her course description.

If there is one last right we should maintain as artists it is our right to fail.