30 going on 13 (strike out) like like or just a “like”?

This paper, written to my BFF, supports my thesis exhibition, 30 going on 13 (Strikeout) like like or just a ''like”? at York University’s Gales Gallery. Using screenprinting, fluorescent acrylic sheets, found objects, projection, and dollar store scented trash bags my thesis is a bold and immersive assemblage of surface and abstract imagery. Guided by a playful exploration of material, my work is influenced by my own anxious and disembodied search for identity and connection in my online and “away from keyboard” (AFK) life as an urban millennial. What does it mean to transmute feelings evoked digitally into material we can physically be with and touch? Embodying a Postdigital aesthetic, one fusing digital and analog means of making and utilizing the immersive characteristics of installation art, my thesis uses materiality, abstraction, and text to center and de-center the viewer calling on them to participate in an assemblage of simultaneously comforting and awkwardly disorienting material fragments.