Inside Job
Old Main Galleries
Mississippi State University
Starkville, MS
Jan 19 - Feb 19, 2026
Inside Job is an exhibition of sculpture, artist books, and wall work created between 2023–26 using primarily hand papermaking and cast iron processes. Produced in both the United States and Japan, the works reflect contemporary post-industrial socio-political landscapes shaped by invisible and visible labor. The title refers simultaneously to the division of domestic labor, the insidiousness of internalized misogyny concealed by beauty and decorum, white-collar crime, and acts of economic, bodily, and historical theft. These works move between landscapes of the mind and the cosmos, and the forests, gardens, and streets of a small agricultural mountain town in Nagano, Japan, situating intimacy alongside empire.Mississippi State University
Starkville, MS
Jan 19 - Feb 19, 2026
Inside and outside, home and yard, domesticity and nature, operate as porous boundaries. Labor is rendered both present and obscured: read between the lines, embedded in materials, and folded into gestures of care. Doilies, leaves, and garden forms reference women’s work and the ways craft is undervalued within the home yet overvalued when reframed by the gallery. Hard iron leaves are fixed in space; paper forms remain fragile, brittle, and prone to collapse. Soft and hard materials, cotton, kozo, iron, stage assumptions of strength and weakness, tenderness and rigidity, beauty and threat.
Recent works like Garden of Earthly Delights or the Implied Violence series grapples with complicity and control. Restraints, sweetness, and ornament become vehicles for violence, quiet, normalized, and frightening. Bloodlines run through the material histories, cotton as a fiber that clothed the world through violent capitalism, iron as industry’s backbone, and paper as both record and erasure. The questions and recitations recur: Be sweet. Don’t say anything. What does our garden sow? What does it grow? Who sits at the table, and who labors to make the table possible?
Made across geographies, the work acknowledges shared and divergent histories. Kozo and cotton carry parallel legacies of cultivation, extraction, and trade while indexing time, care, and exploitation. Inside Job considers how labor produces the materials that then dictate the cost of labor itself and how value accumulates elsewhere while bodies bear the weight. American landscapes appear as sites of treachery and inheritance; domestic interiors echo with the call coming from inside the house.
Made across geographies, the work acknowledges shared and divergent histories. Kozo and cotton carry parallel legacies of cultivation, extraction, and trade while indexing time, care, and exploitation. Inside Job considers how labor produces the materials that then dictate the cost of labor itself and how value accumulates elsewhere while bodies bear the weight. American landscapes appear as sites of treachery and inheritance; domestic interiors echo with the call coming from inside the house.
Inside Job asks viewers to linger with nuance and fraught symbolism, to recognize beauty as a strategy, fragility as strength, and sweetness as a demand. It insists that what appears decorative is often structural, and that the most enduring violences are those that feel familiar, polite, and homegrown.
Contextual reading for this exhibition:
Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert
Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein
The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, specifically ones placed in fictional Morgana, MS
Jubilee by Margaret Walker