2022
Digital video, 8:04
Directed by Nicole Shaffer, Director of Photography Chani Bockwinkle
Evolving work in progress/living archive of queer and trans swimmers and bathers as they transition in and out of Bay Area bodies of water.
During the period of the pandemic when I was experiencing extended isolation, I started open water swimming. It felt urgent and necessary to show up for the sensory feedback of being held by the water, the structured time for checking in and being a body with other queer and trans friends, and noticing wisdom in the elder swimmers’ unique choreographies as they prepared to enter an extreme phenomenal experience. My art practice continues to be concerned with ideas and practices around buoyancy and bridging access to uplifting forces of support.
Thank you swimmers and bathers, Heesoo Kwon, Laura Woltag, Sarah Mehl, Linds Adams, Lindell Dixon, Zarina Dixon, and Rose Rodriguez
Buoyancy
2022
Site-oriented installation at 500 Capp St.
This piece was shown as a part of Libby Black’s solo exhibition titled The Way Things Also Are at 500 Capp Steet, with featured artists AJ Serrano, Sanaz Safanassab and myself. The show made space for queer conversations and interventions within the former home of conceptual artist, David Ireland.
I projected my film of TGNC and queer swimmers + bathers onto the ceiling of the David Ireland house by strapping a projector to the banister with a custom made harness. The harness is made out of floral printed fabrics that artist Maura O’Daughrty and I created from photos of plants that were deemed “unfit” by 20th century Petaluma horticulturist, Luther Burbank. I came across these photos while researching the relationship between Bay Area horticultural practices and the forced sterilization of queer, trans, neurodivergent, and immigrant people in California during the first half of the 20th century. I’ve been using the fabrics to upholster a number of sculptures that celebrate the variance that eugenics attempts to erase.
Visitors to the house were directed to look up towards embodied queer and trans pleasure, joy, and power.
2022
dimensions vary
The installation is a series of four sculptures staged to create an analog projection onto a custom scrim.This body of work has references to home furnishings and is inspired by growing up with my father who organized the apartment we lived in together in non-normative ways. For him, object staging was a mystical practice that involved visions and communications that did not line up with consensus reality. The proposed body of work takes visual language from Enlightenment era Rational aesthetics, such as mystical diagrams, a mad mathematician's geometric schematics, and CA seismographic data and converts their claims of coherence into an abstracted and poetic experience.
Polar-Opposite forms of the third ground
2022
30”x30”x65”
Deconstructed projector, fan, custom printed velour fabric with 5 days of CA seismographic data. The form is modeled from Benjamin Brett’s schematics of “The horn-shaped onde corolla” as delineated in his book, Geometrical Psychology, or, The Science of Representation. Paper mache, wood, pearlite, and mica stand.
For some wild stories about the form, pls continue ❤:
The tulip-like form in the pic is modeled after schematics drawn by Benjamin Betts in 1887. Betts was a hermit-y trigonometric computor who had a hard time communicating his ideas to others and was possibly living with some form of phenomenal (felt) madness. He made mathematical formulas in which numbers represented emotions and poetic equations created geometric forms… which he drew. He called his system geometrical psychology. Betts drawings were a part of a larger aesthetic movement during the victorian era that applied enlightenment era Reason to occult and mystical phenomena via diagramming and charting the unknown in visual art. Like in the work of many of his contemporaries, traces of social darwinism, humanism, Orientalism, and gendered polarities are apparent in the conceptualization of his metaphysics.
Each panel of this sculpture is upholstered with a printed fabric that depicts a unique 24 hour period of CA seismic activity. The surface of the sculpture indicates the existence of earthquakes, legible to the viewer only through the visual representation of seismographic data - an aesthetic language that says more about the desire to predict and contain the earthquake than it does about the phenomenal experience itself.
What i see in this big soft earthquake egg is aesthetic language of victorian era mystical schematics and diagrams, scientific data, lots of ideologies that are at the core of queer, gender variant, mad, neurodivergent shame and marginalization, projections and reflections, all around an unpredictable and moving ground that is only made visible through these other reference points.
I see all that visual language moved thru the hands of a person that holds those identity markers and learned techniques from and collaborates with people with those markers and who feelsss that the ground isn't actually solid or stagnant. And creates a moment out of out of all that info where we look fucking good and can feel the soft pleasurable freaky poetry.
2022
4’x5’
Carpet remnant, vintage yarn, latch hooked infographic, 3 pennies, one hair tie, yellow book.
2022
36”x26”x46”
Repurposed mattress, ceramic step stool and ceiling tile, orange velvet, mobility handles, rainbow catcher, mylar streamers, cotton piping, mirror, custom printed velour fabric with altered photo from the archives of Luther Burbank
My mom's child body
2019
90” x 60”
Acacia pollen, photocopies, and archival inkjet print documenting a site-oriented installation at the former apartment unit of a child trafficker.
This project was the culmination of research into family history and the botanical landscape of an Oakland neighborhood.
2022
40”x.25”x40”
Transparent acrylic sheets, rattan, glass and plastic beads, woven rex-lace and fishing line, yellow flocking, nail polish, custom printed velour fabric with one hour of CA seismographic data
2019
25’ x 25’
Recycled building materials and home furnishings
Sculptures that reference objects used for somatic therapies such as massage tables, physical therapy equipment, and visual references to new age healing products are integrated into a false floor that repositions familiar orientations and encourages vantage points that reveal the structural foundation of the space. A guided meditation placing the listener at a far away location plays softly.
The installation draws inspiration from the book Queer Phenomenology, by Sara Ahmed.
2018
Found bench with customized memorial plaque
Public intervention at various locations.
2014
Salt, roses, carpet. Installation in the apartment I grew up in with my father created the week before he left it.
2013
Threaded thistle seed carriers strung in bathroom over the course of three months.
2005
Site-specific installation, c-print
Sand, artificial poppies, beach umbrella, family.
I made this when I was 19. It’s a beach for my mom and my family. I brought truckloads of sand to a place where I used to hang out as a teenager. I got permission from the Port of Oakland to do it?! It’s one of first things I made that I felt like showing to people..
