ENVIRONMENTAL ART + SOCIAL PRACTICE MFA / UC SANTA CRUZ
Jan Brueghel the Younger's Paradise (2020)
Video, 13 minutes
The Wikipedia page for the word “paradise” is illustrated by a painting attributed to the 17th century Flemish artist Jan Bruegel. When I researched the painting, I learned it was a replica. Conflating the constructed idea of paradise with the painting that shares its name, this video unravels a semi-fictional narrative set in Spring 2020. The work draws upon art history, etymology, cinema production, digital communication, romance, and the onset of pandemic anxiety in an era of misinformation.
Watch full video online HERE.
Rehearsal (2020–)
Collaboration, social practiceIn the video above, collaborating pianists sight-read the first few bars of a 4-page musical score. The score was faithfully transcribed from an audio recording of my friend (living with Alzheimer's) playing a song she’d composed fifty years prior. I worked with a musician to transcribe the recording to piano notation; the resultant score faithfully preserves her playing — melody, tempo, and each slippage — in the midst of her memory loss.
In collaboration with pianists in my community and across the internet, I ask each to record themselves reciting the score. Together, these videos comprise a cumulative "rehearsal" that considers the speculative potential for a memory to be passed, held, translated, shared, improvised, and bolstered through community transference.
This montage depicts twelve of the more-than-twenty collaborating pianists and keyboard players who have contributed recordings to the Rehearsal project so far. Much of this collaboration was done remotely throughout 2020. The musicians pictured above play from their respective living rooms across the globe — in Germany, Nigeria, Canada, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
Closed System (2020)
Sculpture/diorama with multichannel video loopIn collaboration with Ian Costello.
The character within this work is a fictional identity, a smooth-talking tech executive who delivers a meandering lecture on the past and future of progress, tracing natural seed dispersal to 19th century global trade, European colonization, and space travel. Within the confines of a small reflective box, he projects flat enthusiasm for relentless expansion. Unfurling before him are a crop of Dwarf Cavendish banana trees, a subspecies of the most prominent banana monoculture today, disease vulnerable yet surviving through the heavy use of pesticides.
This work was conceived in part following the launch of SpaceX's privatized Crew Dragon mission on May 30th, 2020. The event marked a stark imbalance between events on the ground and the celebrations of those gazing skyward.
Watch full documentation of the work online HERE.
the craziest year of my life I mean ours (2020)
Online performance, 12 minutesThis is an excerpt from a live online Zoom lecture. In this work, My Husband* becomes a single persona addressing our audience as a woman underground. Our character muses on emergency preparedness, scarcity, abundance, and a return to Normal. Her narrative primarily takes place on the first step of the ladder leading out of her underground survival bunker, where she stops to reflect on her time sub-surface, and her conscious efforts to become useful and invest herself in essential (though possibly misguided) forms of production.
* My Husband is the collaborative practice of myself and Eliza Doyle
My Husband Presents: SHTF (Shit-Hits-The-Future) (2020)
Online performance, 23 minutes
This image is a screenshot from another live online Zoom performance. In this work, My Husband* performs a conversation about emerging from the physical structure of an underground survival bunker into a post-collapse society. The two characters in the work discuss a changing landscape of emergency and consider alternatives to the autonomous mindsets of individualist preppers.
* My Husband is the collaborative practice of myself and Eliza Doyle
Ed Making His Body A Tool (2019)
Live performance, 11 minutesIn this performance, Ed’s movements were recorded then projected behind him with a two-second delay. This footage is paired with audio of Ed reflecting on his experience of the performance a year later.
* My Husband is the collaborative practice of myself and Eliza Doyle
Bunker (2019)
A series of lectures/performances created by My Husband* in and around New York state, as part of our ongoing research into Survivalism.
The language for these lectures was compiled from numerous sources: written by us, adapted from conversations and correspondence with over 30 survivalists and preppers, pulled from Science Fiction (think Ursula K. Le Guin), and collaged with accounts of emergency in religious texts.
Above, Bunker as a live performance delivered to an audience inside a fabricated survival bunker.
A Bunker lecture adapted for print, 40 pages.
Correspondence with collaborating Survivalist.
* My Husband is the collaborative practice of myself and Eliza Doyle
My American Girl (2019)
CorrespondenceThis is an excerpt from a collaborative performance of fantasy by a German man (Matthias) and an American woman (myself). Our correspondence began on Berlin Craigslist, where Matthias was “looking for an American girl” years after a cross-continental relationship disintegrated and left him with a feeling of longing. When I met Matthias, I was also filled with a longing for a past relationship. We began corresponding with one another as placebo lovers, inserting each other into real histories and rewriting past narratives, transforming our loss into a collective love object.
The project began as email correspondence, then transitioned to a series of videos sent back and forth. With each volley, we advanced a fictional narrative.
Love Life (2018–19)
Correspondence, 57 pages
Love Life is a dime novel documenting my correspondence with a cowboy named Love Life, born in South Dakota and living in northern New Mexico.
I met Love Life on Craigslist in September 2018 after posting an ad for collaborators. We began writing a Western together, sending paragraphs back and forth to advance the plot. Love Life introduced our protagonist, Timothy, a working cowboy in Arizona. Inhabiting Timothy from different angles, Love Life and I began creating an autonomous character imbued with romance and projection. When Love Life disappeared suddenly and without warning, our correspondence shifted, and the project became a collection of letters sent and unanswered. Created over the course of four months during a period of upheaval and transition in my own life, these letters form a body of writing that explores intimacy, longing, displacement, and western romance fiction.
Western Romance (2018)
Vibrator, handcrafted spurDallas Cowboys (2017–18)
Video, 12 minutes
Dallas Cowboys is a video that distills hours of oral histories recorded in the pastures, offices, sale barns, and around the dinner tables of working cowboys on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas.
Advertising in local newspapers, across the internet, and through small town word-of-mouth, I spent two weeks driving through the Lone Star state meeting self-identified cowboys and collecting their stories. Intrigued by the collision of mythology and reality in the narratives of these men, I fabricated a set in my studio, reminiscent of a film backdrop or the stage and pulpit decorations of the Cowboy Churches nearby. I invited the working cowboys to inhabit the facade. Footage taken in the studio was later edited together with their oral histories.
Souvenirs (2016)
100 slip-cast porcelain horseshoesCowgirl (2016)
Milk, porcelain, Ennio MorriconeNostós Fetish Machine (2015)
Installation, video
Nostós Fetish Machine an installation comprised of two parts: a megaphone that reads and speaks text, and a television that silently broadcasts text. Together, the work performs a dialogue. This non-human machine imagines history as something that can touch, be touched, and touch itself, proposing the act of narrating history as both pleasure-seeking and violent.Watch video of the text HERE.
Attic (2015)
Installation, 4 x 5 x 12 ft.
Attic is an installation built on a scaffolding unit. Viewers enter the structure from a ladder below, suspending disbelief as they emerge into a sunlit room. This work is a reflection on the attic as a site for memory, escape, madness, and longing.