From Hotel Room to Shredded Bits to Fancy Boxes

So I'm sitting here looking at these clear acrylic boxes filled with shredded pieces of my Plus series and thinking about how weird art is. Like, really weird.

This whole thing started by accident in a hotel room in Ventura. October 7, 2017. I forgot to turn off the bathroom light after watching the sunrise and there was this frosted glass door just glowing. I had my phone and I was like... what if I just pressed my body against this glass? What would that look like?

I was dealing with my eating disorder, hating my body most days, wearing what I called my "armor of fat" that kept me contained inside this shell. But something about that glass barrier made it feel safe to experiment. Like I could be naked and vulnerable but still protected.

The photos that came out of that morning were... different. My body wasn't ugly anymore. It was creating these silhouettes, these shapes that were actually beautiful. Form, line, curve. I was playing with ideas that my body could do anything - yeah it's curvy and round, but it was pliable and changeable and making art.

Crown Plaza Hotel Ventura CA 2017

Exhibition Life

Fast forward to January 2018 and those images are hanging at Ark Gallery in Altadena. Big prints on the walls, some printed on transparencies hanging from the ceiling so people had to walk around them. Had to confront my body directly.

The opening was intense. Artist talk in February. Closing reception in March. People responded to the work in ways I didn't expect. They saw the beauty I was discovering. They understood the conversation about body image and concepts of beauty that I was trying to have.

But then what? Exhibition ends, work goes into storage. This is the part nobody talks about - what happens to your art after the gallery lights go out. Boxes. Waiting. Time passing.

The Storage Years

My practice kept evolving while Plus sat in storage. I started "Perceive Me" - had 60 artists paint nude portraits of me. Kept sharing my body on Instagram as this rebellious act against photoshop culture and beauty industry manipulation. The Plus series was still important to me, but other projects needed attention.

Storage is art purgatory. Your work just sits there. Sometimes I'd think about those pieces and wonder if they'd ever see light again.

The Shredding Decision

Then I decided to shred them. Not out of anger or failure - it felt necessary. Ritualistic, even.

I write about "cutting up/de(con)structing/reconstructing art objects related to my identity as an analogy to transformation" and this felt like that. The work had served its purpose as whole photographs. Time for them to serve differently.

The act of shredding was actually kind of meditative. Watching these images that documented my breakthrough moment - learning to see my body as beautiful - get cut into strips. But it wasn't destruction. It was transformation.

Cinema Strips

You know what's funny? The shredded bits really do look like film strips. Which makes perfect sense because the Plus series was always about seeing, about the gaze, about how we perceive bodies. About capturing time and movement and transformation.

Film is made up of individual frames that only create meaning in relationship to each other. Now my work exists as fragments that reference their own history as images, as documentation, as cinema.

Acrylic Resurrection

Now they live in these elegant acrylic boxes with sophisticated labels. Ready to be sold, owned, taken home. The transformation from large-scale gallery confrontation to intimate object you can hold is pretty dramatic.

Someone can buy these fragments and live with them daily. Different kind of intimacy than the gallery experience. More private. More personal.

The clear boxes feel right - transparency has always been part of this work. From frosted glass to clear shower walls to transparency film to clear acrylic containers. There's this thread of seeing through, of layers of visibility and concealment.

What This All Means

Looking at the complete journey - hotel room discovery to gallery exhibition to storage to destruction to elegant product - I see patterns that run through all my work.

We discover ourselves. We present what we've found. We retreat and process. We transform. We emerge differently. The Plus series aged alongside my understanding of my own body, my recovery, my voice as an artist.

The work isn't static. It keeps teaching me about vulnerability, about sharing personal struggles, about insisting that all bodies deserve to be seen as art. Form changes but the truth stays.

Each phase was necessary. The hotel room breakthrough. The gallery sharing. The storage settling. The destruction honoring transformation themes. The acrylic boxes creating new ownership possibilities.

Art lives and breathes and changes. Just like bodies. Just like recovery. Just like everything that matters.

Those fragments in their fancy containers carry the same message that started in that Ventura hotel room: our bodies, all our bodies, in all their complexity and curves and struggles, are instruments of creation.

The form keeps changing but that truth? That stays.