“Insurality Etude" is a fully immersive multimedia installation that offers a place to reconsider small town American life with reinvigorated nuance often denied to rural, majority white, working-class communities. At large, it is made to resemble a quintessential, if scaled-down living room and kitchen space at your grammy and poppy's modest home somewhere in rural America. Between the black and white TV radio playing old country hits, the slightly-crooked "Live, Laugh, Love" sign, and the camo button-up draped from a hook by the cabinet, however, are subtle oddities. If you look carefully and patiently enough, you'll catch the pairs of googly eyes, strategically placed for the most optimal opportunistic voyeurism; childrens' books with Chinese fables, which feel wrongly exotic in this place; and on the charming family photos which line the walls is my own face, a subtle perplexiveness contextually inscribed into its indifference.

Feeling cornered and frustrated by ebb and flow of urban and suburban elitism, this project allowed me to undertake a deeper and more intentional consideration of my own ambivalent nostalgia growing up in my rural snow-globe of a hometown in Central New York. On the one hand, the project celebrates generosity and reciprocity, two beautiful hallmarks of rural community; participants are invited to serve themselves grits (savory, of course), do their own dishes afterwards, and perhaps do someone else's as well. On the other hand, the project reflects the sort of unshakable feeling of difference spun by the gap between my Chinese heritage and the town's homogenous racial whiteness (it was 95% white). A stream of projected title cards wonder aloud: can we, how do we reconcile the tension between the incomparable beauty of close-knit community and its heftily harmful price of insularity?