Poor uses collage methods with paint, hand embroidery, and screen printing to create the sometimes juxtaposed, camouflaged, or assimilated Toile de Jouy geographies. Scenes often occupied by human presence are experiments in relationality that explore materials and subjectivity in the context of revisionist histories—focusing on the American/Midwestern/rural fictions that layer and colligate Colonial, white-supremacy mythos, Christian demagogy, or other oppressive means of storytelling. This work combines the pastoral quaintness of the ferme ornée with the theatrics of faith. Created as a reaction to moral architectures, Poor's art sources imagery ranging from 18th-century agrarian landscapes and folk art to theater posters and pop culture. Within the image layers, paint obscures and embroidery re-structures the picture plane while simultaneously re-branding and contextualizing the full image. By utilizing methods seen in decorative arts, I aim to build parallels between bodily/mental interiority and domestic spaces. I view these structures as a macrocosm of the self that holds both the possibilities of mutable appearance/identity and the inevitability of inherited values.
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