“Theory itself is assumed to be abstract: something is more theoretical the more abstract it is, the more it is abstracted from everyday life. To abstract is to drag away, detach, pull away, or divert. We might then have to to drag theory back, to bring theory back to life.” -Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

My work deals with movement, infrastructure and framing. I think about the sociopolitical through the micro and the physical: a car breakdown, a crack, a pipe leak. I value touching and feeling as modes of knowledge production, ways of understanding the world that privilege intimacy over distance.

Over the course of the last three years I have been making work alongside uprisings for racial justice, a global pandemic, and my involvement in labor organizing. These experiences directly inform ideas which circle around the work: rupture, anxiety, disorientation, and a call to collectively reimagine new forms of relation.

As neoliberal ideologies have dominated the past four decades we find ourselves navigating the hyperreal, a condition where images have overtaken objects, sign value has undermined material value, and distortions of the lens have colonized our vision. Within online platforms information has become flattened, inconceivable violence appears alongside inconsequential clickbait, and profit motives have excised any liberatory potential. Conspiracy and its theories run rampant as old narratives are abandoned and austerity breeds alienation. Corporate entities resort to more desperate and obscene forms of marketing logic to compete for the attention of an increasingly precarious consumer class. Bandy’s work considers these events through their material residue, brand collaborations, memetic objects, conspiratorial artifacts, and sites of occurrence. Engaging with memetic image culture, the works are unfixed. Objects and images shift form, each version further mediated than the last, pointing us towards the pleasures and perversions of an increasingly virtual world.

Organization has multiple layers in this thesis: organizing space (architecture), organizing objects (arrangement as gesture), organizing of a body both inherent (biological) and from outside (culture). I use these frameworks to discuss my research into interiors where design and art overlap. I will think about gaps between images and objects by exploring Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. I will think about performativity of space by adapting from Roger Caillois’ theories of mimicry. Through Adolf Loos's architectural planning method Raumplan, I will consider ways in which sculpture is conceived of. To me organization is a constellation of concepts that embody various methods of working and thinking.

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