Thank you to Save Art Spaces for their amazing work bringing art into public space in such an accessible and exciting way. For the month of August, I’ll have a piece in their QUEER FUTURES show on a billboard in West Hollywood, LA. There will be QUEER FUTURES billboard takeovers all over LA—art that can be viewed safely during COVID, is free, super queer, and gets to converse with the buildings and streets around it. The piece that was selected for the show is a still from a recent performance, we didn’t want to be moved. In the performance, I work with the weight of myself+my mother in clay: 280 pounds.
Center for Craft Grant Recipient
Really excited about this one! Been working all summer to build this out, and am so grateful to the Center for Craft for supporting this project to bring weird clay experiments to queer and trans folks in LA… I recommend folks to apply for their Craft Futures Fund, there are still a few rounds left!
“This project creates a clay education network of queer community members, in order to break the isolation of COVID-19 by building kinship with and through clay experimentation. Scaling a project framework I developed this Spring, I have pivoted to working with queer artists to develop dynamic lessons to directly engage queer folks with raw clay craft in their homes. With your support, this project will reach 90 queer individuals in the Los Angeles area with free clay kits, unique monthly lessons, and a monthly digital “soft blobs” happy hour.”
"Of Monsters & Femme" featured on Artforum
“In June 2019, I traced the fourteen dams of the Colorado River with my body over the course of three weeks, creating a haptic and indexical mapping of a series of structures that are abjectly sublime in their inability to be adequately represented. How else to meet this stolid performance of patriarchal power than with my own queer performativity?
This body of work proposes dams as “settler colonial land art”—immense sculptures that shift the topographies and futures of our environments—where the materials of concrete, wood, and steel are jammed tightly into rock, dirt, and clay. The absurd or invented documentation of this site-specific performance connects the architecture of the land with the architectures of our bodies, both of which are shaped by the same complex flows of power and ideology. Sites of repression (both psychic and structural) generate immense amounts of energy. With this work, I propose an ethics of staying in and grappling with the trouble: creating space for grief, wit(h)ness, and response-ability.”
See it here: https://www.artforum.com/spotlight-programs/calarts-83224?idx=16
"at 901, we spill" being screened virtually at Leaky Container, July 1--30
“In the first eight weeks of quarantine, alongside one another, we turned our video cameras on, wrote, recorded, collaged, smashed, collapsed, rejoiced, renounced. Ten artists in a video class at California Institute of the Arts, in the midst of a global pandemic. We were ready to publish the website with our experiments when the revolution started, so we decided to postpone the dates. In May we said: The containers we grew up with, rely upon, build with: leaking. Care and consideration for our collective health: leaking. Delusions of American exceptionalism and "freedom for all": leaking. Our mental health, daily rhythms, ways of connecting: leaking.
And then the leaking became a flood. A very much needed flood. We welcome the flood. “
https://leakycontainer.com/
Check out some quarantine-loony films from the early days, as mentored by Abigail Raphael Collins. Exhibition text written by me, poster by woohee cho, site built by Evelyn Hang Yin, video work by the best bunch.