I made an address as a part of Artists-In-Presidents: Transmissions to Power. You can listen to it on Spotify or any podcast app. This image is my presidential portrait created in collaboration with my favorite portrait photographer @maxknightmare . Thank you @blackwoodgallery_utm for all your support and creative work!
As many of us were, @mayabookbinder was pretty marked by the great toilet paper shortage of early pandemic days. Here is a side table I made for her, as a constant reminder of life's precarity and the things we do to try and meet the moment. I am selling my Disaster Furniture now exclusively in @thelabsf The Lab’s store! Link in bio.
Inspired in part by the theatrics of survival in popular reality TV shows like “Doomsday Preppers” or “Naked and Afraid,” I am creating Disaster Furniture to playfully examine how American culture/capitalism sells “Safety” and “Disaster.” BUT also I’m interested in how we imagine our own roles in the face of both fast moving and slow motion disaster. I am working with you (buyers) to specially tailor a survival kit encapsulating your own apocalyptic fears in a beautiful glass case mounted onto a cherry wood base. Sturdy enough to be used as a side table or nightstand. With this unique art object / conversation starter you’ll be ready for anything!
Today is my 39th bday. As some of you know I’ve spent my life working to name my “3 Deepest Desires” a practice I learned from The Floating Neutrinos (a group of psycho-spiritual raft people that helped me know the world beyond my tiny south Texas border town). It has taken me decades to learn to understand what I truly want from this life. Like so many of us I grew up lost in all the ways capitalism externalizes us— tells us who to be and what to want. I am here to report that I am living my 3 deepest desires with out compromise. I could never do it with out all of you who love me. This ribbon dance presented me with an explosive moment of clarity—- gratitude for all of you that show up and demand to live freely in this broken beautiful world. Also @faye_driscoll is the coolest love.
My installation is open for one more week at Mills College Art Museum! This is FutureHellNow. Sometimes I refer to this part of my practice as my Survival Series. FutureHellNow is both an installation and a performance space. It's about that inner world of panic especially present for me when I am in my safest domestic spaces. During gallery hours you can take your shoes off and get in this bed. I have left an article for you to read by the Institute for Precarious Consciousness. They write that "Each phase of capitalism has a particular affect which holds it together...One aspect of every phase’s dominant affect is that it is a public secret, something that everyone knows, but nobody admits, or talks about. As long as the dominant affect is a public secret, it remains effective, and strategies against it will not emerge. Public secrets are typically personalised. The problem is only visible at an individual, psychological level; the social causes of the problem are concealed. Each phase blames the system’s victims for the suffering that the system causes. And it portrays a fundamental part of its functional logic as a contingent and localised problem. In the modern era (until the post-war settlement), the dominant affect was misery.... When misery stopped working as a control strategy, capitalism switched to boredom....Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localised locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination.... What we now need is a machine for fighting anxiety – and this is something we do not yet have." One of their thesis' states that in order to reverse our perspective and see not from anxiety but from our own desires we need to learn to define what is happening inside of us as real, we need to disrupt the public secret that our experiences are a result of individual problems. "We need to learn to "speak with a self-expressive voice (rather than a neoliberal performance derived from the compulsion to share banal information)...”
Here are some beautiful images shot by @robbiesweeny of Old Man, Dance WIP. In April I enlisted 5 white men over the age of 65, all of whom are not performers, to explore white male performances of power. We entered into an agreement to subvert the white male gaze, by instead placing my queer gaze onto their bodies. I am curious to explore my impulses towards them - to not distance myself from white men no matter how bad I want to, but instead explore the possibilities of directing them into shapes that might be loving, healing, productive, or cathartic. So far, it’s impossible for them to make the right shape but there has been something very meaningful in watching their bodies be of service and up against impossible odds. Thanks to Dia Penning, Keith Hennessy, Sofia Cordova, and @millsartmuseum .
