FEATURED PROJECTS
Selected portfolio works from 2016-2023.
1. Parklet: a public project for the Sisters of St. Joseph Neighborhood Network
2. Parklet: a public project for the Sisters of St. Joseph Neighborhood Network (detail)
4. The Nomadic Bread Belt (Detail, Field Study/Cape Cod)
5. The Nomadic Bread Belt (process)
7. Self Preservation (Installation View)
8. Lady Pickles as part of Self Preservation (detail)
9. Self Preservation (video detail)
12. Gum Person: (Too Much Build Up, Built Up Too Much)
15. Dance for Your Dessert: Coney Island Boardwalk
19. Honeybees and Homemakers; Pollination and Gendered Labor
20. Collective Sigh (interactive sauerkraut making performance)
21. Collective Sigh (Project Summary Video)
1. Title: Parklet: A public project for the Sisters of St. Joseph Neighborhood Network in Erie PA
Media: wood installation with hardware, paint, plants, and books on top of trailer
Size: 16’x7’x7’
Date: 2022
Description: SSJNN is a nonprofit that started as a soup kitchen. This piece is inspired by the kitchen as a meeting place and accommodates every day public use by providing seating, table space, and a free library. The shade sail is removable and can be disassembled when the parklet is in transit. Planters located on the parklet bumper are entirely removable with a french cleat system. In Erie, PA., SSJNN uses the parklet at farmers markets and public events to perform outreach and to educate the community about their varied programming. Made in collaboration with Henry Pullin
2. Title: Parklet: A public project for the Sisters of St. Joseph Neighborhood Network in Erie PA (detail)
Media: wood installation with hardware, paint, plants, and books on top of trailer
Size: 16’x7’x7’
Date: 2022
Description: A free library is contained in the “fridge”. Wooden sculptures (oven mitt, kitchen timer, and coffee cup (not pictured) are permanently attached to the walls to avoid theft. Seats painted to resemble counters and an oven provide a space for gathering. Plants in the back wall are contained in plastic planters and can be removed during transport and the winter months. An acrylic pipe system inside the planter wall allows water to drain and flow from the underside of the structure. Made in collaboration with Henry Pullin.
3. Title: The Nomadic Bread Belt (front and back view)
Media: Glass sculpture with bread proofing (flour, yeast, water, salt), sourdough starter (flour, yeast, water), nylon webbing, metal hardware and fabric on mannequin
Size: 54” x 10” x 15”
Date: 2020
Description: The“Nomadic Bread Belt” is a wearable device that allows you to carry your bread dough and sourdough starter with you wherever you go. The heat from your body provides a warm environment for your starter to grow while also allowing your bread to rise over a series of hours. The “Bread Belt” helps you create a symbiotic relationship with your sourdough bread; provide it with a warm body and it will feed you. As the wearer takes the “Bread Belt” through different environments, wild yeast and bacteria interact and become a part of the sourdough starter that is maturing inside of the glass vessel. This wearable creates a yeast and flour concoction that is site specific, to both its host and the environment they have traversed through.
Made through the Idea Furnace Residency at Pittsburgh Glass.
4. Title: The Nomadic Bread Belt (Field Study, Cape Cod)
Media: Photo documentation of field study performance with The Nomadic Bread Belt (glass sculpture with bread proofing (flour, yeast, water, salt), sourdough starter (flour, yeast, water), nylon webbing, metal hardware and fabric)
Size: dimensions variable
Date: 2020
Description: The belt consists of one large glass vessel and one smaller vessel, both with attached cloth lids that protect the interiors from bugs or stray body debris. Because a sourdough starter will interact with its environment, incorporating wild yeast into its makeup, the starter will include yeast from the body and the area in which the person has traveled. This creates a site-specific sourdough starter and loaf of bread.
5. Title: The Nomadic Bread Belt (process)
Media: Timelapse of dough proofing in glass sculpture with nylon webbing, metal hardware and fabric on mannequin
Size: Timelapse: 21 seconds, Sculpture: 54” x 10” x 15”
Date: 2020, 2023
Description: When first developing a starter, it should be fed and maintained in the larger vessel for approximately seven days. At this point, if it doubles in size within 4 hours of feeding, a portion of it can be transferred to the smaller vessel for future bread. Leave some of the starter in the large vessel and add water, flour, salt, and other ingredients according to your bread dough recipe. Now mix in the larger vessel for proofing and rising. The human body maintains a 98.6-degree temperature, so the bread belt is designed with thick glass walls to block some of the body heat in order for the dough to be in its ideal 70-degree environment.
7. Title: Self Preservation (Installation View)
Media: Looped video projection, iron bathtub, display shelves, pickle jars, vinyl stickers
Size: Dimensions variable
Date: 2022
Description: I prepare myself to be pickled along with cucumbers, garlic, mustard seed, dill, and peppercorns. The pickling process aims to slow down time, an impossible feat that society demands women to attempt daily. In the bath, I capture a moment of youth and join the cucurbits in their existential quest to live forever. Videography assistance by Michelle Nash.
8. Title: Lady Pickles as part of Self Preservation (detail)
Media: display shelves, pickles, brine, jars, vinyl stickers with logo
Size: (2) 35” x 8” x 8”
Date: 2022
Description: These pickles are canned after being produced as a result of the “Self Preservation” process. They are branded with “Lady Pickle” vinyl labels and can be purchased as products separate from the rest of the piece.
9. Title: Self Preservation (video detail)
Media: Excerpt from a looped video projection with iron bathtub, display shelves, pickle jars, vinyl stickers
Size: 2 minute 53 second excerpt from an 8 minute 39 second long video
Date: 2022
Description: Video is projected from above into a cast iron, clawfoot bathtub and plays on a loop. Videography assistance by Michelle Nash.
10. Title: Soup Shoes
Media: Bouillon powder, gelatin
Size: 5"x 10" x 9", size 7.5 shoes
Date: 2023
Description: "Soup Shoes” are meant to be worn by the cook and kicked back and forth in a pot of hot water until they dissolve.
Ingredients: water, “Soup Shoes”, bare feet.
Directions: Fill a large pot with water and sit over the pot. Put on “Soup Shoes”. Swing legs and kick feet back and forth in water until “Shoes” dissolve. Serve with bread.
11. Title: Soup Shoes Soup
Media:photo strip with video stills from process with Soup Shoes (gelatin, bouillon powder), hot water, stock pot
Size: photo strip: 26.6” x 5” Shoes: size 7.5, Stock pot: 32 QT
Date: 2023
Description: The maker’s feet become an essential ingredient in the recipe for “Soup Shoes Soup”. The cook must wear the bouillon foot apparel and sit over the pot of hot water, kicking her feet back and forth. The soup is both comforting and disgusting as it warms the soul and tastes faintly of the maker’s feet.
12. Title: Gum Person: (Too Much Build Up, Built Up Too Much)
Media: photo of wearable sculpture made with nylon stockings, polyester batting, acrylic paint
Size: Sculpture is 66"x 24"x 18"
Date: 2021
Description: My maternal grandmother (who worked in the Double Bubble factory in Philadelphia) developed throat cancer in her final years. She felt that the cancer was a result of words that had gotten caught in her throat and attributed the illness to not speaking her mind enough. Bubble gum is like anxiety and built-up, unsaid words. Things we chew, continuously processing but never fully digesting. These unresolved feelings are scorned when they leave our bodies like an oozy blob on the sidewalk or a small mass tucked and calcified under a chair. We expel this anxiety and leave it in the outside world, imprinted with our DNA and marked by our bite and the diseases we carry. Gum Person is annoying, messy, sticky, and drippy, and they get stuck in your hair.
13. Title: ABC Gum Machine
Medium: found bubble gum machine, aluminum, cast bubble gum, LED lights, aerosol paint, vinyl decals
Size: 14” x 14” x 45”
Date: 2021
Description: Prototype to sell the fictional product ABC Gum (chicle gum base, confectioner's sugar, corn syrup, and bubble gum flavor cast in a food-safe mold made from the artist's chewed gum). This piece is filled with alluring pink gum pieces that, upon closer inspection, appear to be chewed through means of a mass mastication production system. I am interested in bubble gum for its ephemerality in use and flavor, its mutability, and its difficulty in digestion. In my middle school, abstinence was glorified and encouraged by equating virginity to a fresh piece of gum. Once chewed, no one else would want to put it in their mouth.
14. Title: ABC Gum Machine (detail)
Medium: found bubble gum machine, aluminum, cast bubble gum, LED lights, aerosol paint, vinyl decals
Size: 14” x 14” x 45”
Date: 2021
Description: Gum pieces are made from chicle gum base, confectioner's sugar, corn syrup, and bubble gum flavor cast in a food-safe mold made from the artist's chewed gum.
15. Title: Dance for Your Dessert: Coney Island Boardwalk
Media: Performance with ice cream shaking canvas pouches, plastic gloves, heavy cream, vanilla extract, sugar, maraschino cherries, sprinkles, whipped cream, hairnet
Size: 3 minute 25 second video excerpt from a 2 hour performance
Date: 2019
Description: In this piece, a canister with rock salt and ice, holding a container of ice cream ingredients, is strapped to my legs. I move constantly and dance to shake the ingredients. In the eleven minutes of constant movement and shaking it takes to produce the ice cream, I construct the rest of the sundae in tasting cups and entertain and educate my audience about the process.
16. 0 degrees
Media: proposal sketch for constructed suit and performance/composition collaboration (with composer and cellist)
Date: 2023
Description: In this piece, a solo cellist performs a piece of music composed specifically to be physically and absurdly taxing, testing/pushing his athleticism in order to raise his body temperature. He wears a constructed suit that holds snow in close proximity to his body. As the piece of music unfolds and the musician labors harder, he produces enough body heat to raise the temperature of the snow bags to the point of melting (0 degrees C). This piece explores burnout culture and utilitarianism with a performance of excess: the performer must over-exert himself, increasing his efforts to a point of no return and may only cease activity once the process of transforming snow into a consumable product is completed.
17. Title: Bee House
Media: wood, drywall, shingles, two live honey bee colonies, glass, video
Size: 62.5”d x 51”w x 117”h
Date: 2016, 2022
Description: The Bee House Project was funded by the Center for Pollinator Research at Penn State University. The immersive installation connects the free labor of honeybees with the expected domestic and emotional labor of women in our current patriarchal and capitalist society. It houses two bee observation hives (containing two live honey bee colonies) that can be viewed in the windows both inside and outside of the house. A video is looped in a frame inside of the house. The piece was revealed at the 2016 Penn State Department of Entomology's Great Insect Fair and was later installed on the main campus of Penn State University. The project was adapted for Soft Machine Gallery in 2022.
18. Title: Bee House (detail)
Media: wood, drywall, shingles, two live honey bee colonies, glass, video
Size: 62.5”d x 51”w x 117”h
Date: 2016, 2022
Description: Detail of honey bee colonies in observation hives (built by the artist). Acrylic tubes connected to the observation hives run up through the walls and roof, allowing bees to leave the hives in search of food. When the project is installed in a high traffic area and bees need to be contained, these tubes can be removed and jars with sugar water are attached to the wooden frame of the observation hives for sustenance. Wooden shutters on the outside of the house can be raised and lowered in order to protect the bees from direct sunlight.
19. Title: Honeybees and Homemakers; Pollination and Gendered Labor
Media: excerpt from video
Size: 54 second excerpt from 6 minute 9 second video
Description: Video looped on iPad in an 11.5" x 9.5" wooden frame installed inside of the house structure in the "Bee House" project. The entire video can be viewed at: https://www.christina-dietz.com/the-bee-house-project. The project was adapted for Soft Machine Gallery in 2022.
Society values women under the condition that they act in accordance with the normative role of caregiver as well as that of domestic servant. This role is hyperbolized in this video as the women take on the role of honeybee in a future society that has driven bees to extinction. They become a prosthetic pollinator, using their hats as reproductive aids. Both women and honeybees, as a whole, are expected to perform an invisible labor necessary for sustaining life. This labor is undervalued and overlooked until the absence of those that perform it is felt, at which point it is “too late”.
In the film, the role of fieldworker is aestheticised, reflecting the trend of growing food/gardening happening in privileged households (often from a white upper-middle class background) that have the time and money to consider this a hobby. The U.S. romanticizes its roots of agriculture while wholly ignoring the labor of enslaved people and immigrants that have fed its people for centuries. The systematic homogenization of society and agriculture is a dangerous road that leads to extinction.
20. Title: Collective Sigh (interactive sauerkraut making performance)
Media: photo documentation of the process of making collective sauerkraut with cabbage, traditional ceramic fermenting crocks, knives, salt, paper, pencils, visitors
Size: dimensions variable
Date: 2021
Description: During the Collective Sigh project, visitors gathered to preserve food in times of abundance (summer) for times of scarcity (winter). The gatherings helped us store up on social interaction when it was safe (summer/low virus risk) in preparation for times when it was unsafe to be together (winter/higher virus count).
Open studios visitors were invited to prepare cabbage for collective sauerkraut. Visitors labeled thoughts and actions that sustained them through the past year (2020) of lockdowns and isolation and these labels went on finished jars of kraut. The sauerkraut (known to be beneficial to the immune system) fermented throughout the duration of the exhibition and my residency time. Those who participated in the making of the kraut in addition to other visitors were invited to return to take a jar of the final product at a culminating Open Studios event.
21. Title: Collective Sigh (Project Summary Video)
Media: Summary video of project with sculptures, jars of pickles, looped sound piece, signage, sound prompt booklet, vinyl stickers with branding, fermentation crocks, books about fermentation, jars of sauerkraut from interactive performance
Size: Video: 3 minutes 47 seconds, Project: dimensions variable
Date: 2021
Description: Made during Summer 2021 in response to the hyper-awareness of the release of breath and exchange of air developed during the global health crisis. This piece explores the idea of a collective exhale and frames both the action of sighing and the process of fermentation as methods of resilience. The byproduct of both of these processes is C02. In this project, CO2 is viewed not as a waste product but as a sign of life and a byproduct of resilience during transformative moments in time. The final installation summed up the 3-month residency at the Meet Factory (Prague) and housed the following: collectively made sauerkraut and pickles that viewers were invited to take, the looped sound piece made from the recording of “sound prompts” played from speakers inside of fermentation crocks, the “Sound Prompt” booklet, sculptures, books about fermentation, and branded stickers from the project.