Exposing the messy nature of reproductive energy

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The milk in this exhibition is not real. After much experimentation, Liu filled the pump with “magic milk,” a proprietary formula purchased from a magic shop that requires no refrigeration and comes with a warning that it is “not a food product.” Don’t drink!” However, it seems plausible. When installing the piece, Liu envisioned the milk jugs dominating the entire gallery floor, further immersing visitors in the sight and sound landscape of newborn use.

Pipes on the floor filled with white liquid
Untitled (Feeding in Space and Time) It uses 328 feet of plastic tubing filled with artificial milk.

CELESTE SLOMAN

Liu, who holds graduate degrees from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and MIT’s Media Lab, graduated in She resumes teaching five days after giving birth in 2021. She has signed a new contract as an associate professor of practice at Penn and the university. Maternity leave is only given to employees older than one year. Although she was allowed to teach with emphasis at first from her home in Queens, she was pouring over nursing. “I developed this intense relationship with the pump, hearing his voice instead of my baby’s screams made me despair. Donna Haraway’s cyborg moment was amazing, she says, referring to feminist science and technology scholars who have written about the cyborg, “not dreaming of society on the organic family model.”

It was also a time when Liu headed for new research. Her discoveries emerge in works on view at Cuchifritos Gallery, which comprise a series of three-dimensional meditations on technology, motherhood and childhood in an algorithm-enabled world.

Untitled (milk fat globules) list
in Untitled (milk fat globules)A milk molecule, photographed under a microscope, is superimposed, color-corrected and printed on an aluminum panel in the famous scallop-edged shape of nursing pads.

CELESTE SLOMAN

Pumping It is now on view as part of the second edition of the exhibition “Designing Motherhood” at the MassArt Museum in Boston. Michele Millar Fisher, a member of the curatorial team, wrote that the work “cuts precisely the ways in which reproductive energy is hidden, romanticized, socially forbidden and devalued.”

Liu’s work has added urgency and resonance since its inversion. Roe v. Wade. Who controls, supports and does reproductive work are not just bedroom or broom closet questions (never should they be). They play in the streets, government houses and the Supreme Court.

Millar Fisher by Liu Pump installation and artist Hiromi Marisa Ozaki, Sputnik! He showed similarities between the work known as 2010 Menstrual machine It mimics the experience of menstruation; The video portion of the article shows an imaginary day in the life of a young person who builds a device to experience life as a womb.

Liu has long been fascinated by this kind of simulation experience. In the year In 2019, she decided to create her own devices, including a garment, after watching YouTube videos of men taking on the pains of fake labor in order to understand their wives’ experiences and finding them at different stages. Untitled (Women’s Pain)Any non-pregnant person is equipped with a stomach and electrodes to help them feel the weight and comfort of pregnancy. Another in the series, Untitled (Small Conveniences), pretends not to control. Made in collaboration with the manufacturer Randy Shandrosky, the clothes look like underwear and give one the impression of a sexual effect, but these experiences are not generally considered sexual.

Untitled (Small Inconveniences) artwork is displayed in the gallery
Untitled (Small Conveniences): A garment made to simulate impotence as one of the symptoms of pregnancy.

Hanke Weitzer

Her pieces show a mischievous humor embedded in the everyday humiliations of modern life. Consumer culture may seem to celebrate pregnancy, but products aimed at pregnant women focus on things that are “wrong” with the pregnant body: mood swings, stretch marks, impotence. In response, Liu created Consumer pregnancyIt includes a series of creams, masks, and potions designed in a high-millennial style (monochrome packaging, sans serif fonts), but faithfully labeled “fatigue,” “breathlessness,” “pimple.” If you see them on the pharmacy shelf, you will be attracted at first, but once you read the description, even as a pregnant woman, it will be difficult to tell. no thanks.

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