33 ✨
Feeling very in love with it all. Colombia gave many gifts, and among them was the melting away of home, it’s events, my first language, my daily preconceptions and apprehensions. Instead the hard work of a second language always requires letting go of understanding it all or being understood, giving room for what’s shared in the kindness of a touch, the eyes, riding waves together, the smell of our sweat, a full plate. Many times I just listened to the sound of it all, the roar of chatter and energetic tongues filling the air with their want to communicate.
Thinking about building trust, beauty, and other additions to the world with their own gravitational pulls. Believing in looking and listening. Eyes up, stout heart.
Documentation of my recent solo exhibition “Alloy: a symbiosis, a sympathy, contagions, the wind” at Knox College in Galesburg. Thank you for the wealth of exchanges and embraces.
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
In 2004, Galesburg’s Maytag Manufacturing plant closed. The factory workers who made the last refrigerators bought them, signed three, and wrote “ THE LAST TOP MOUNT REFRIGERATORS PRODUCED IN GALESBURG, ILLINOIS WITH ‘PRIDE’ BY MEMBERS OF IAM LOCAL 2063 SEPT 14TH , 2004.”
Coming of age at that moment, Moreno saw a site defined by a narrative of industrial manufacturing’s exodus. “Galesburg, a good place to die” rode on cars’ bumpers. “We used to be a place that made things.” A narrative of absence set in, charged with the discomfort of inhabiting a vacuum’s negative space. As child he asked “what does it mean to grow up in the end? What happens after the end?”
The works in Alloy began with formally asking these questions in 2014 and continue today.
To cut, to grind, to cast, to repair, to strip, to cover, to transfer, to transport, to arrange, to bandage… building underscores an ambiguity around material endings and beginnings. A woodworker’s labor begins with a tree’s ending: to extend the life of that body with its own graining, subtle coloring, an aura, that will exist this once—never to reappear— as a substance with unique fault lines that informs what the woodworker will do. The material culture of endings is saturated with such inheritances.
Responding to the emergence of nostalgia as an sustainably animating sentiment of American political and social life, what might the capacities of craftsmanship—a repertoire of skills and ethics — offer to both acknowledge loss and critique assumptions about return and revival? What do these objects have to say as sculpture that persists, fails, and cultivates a beauty from having lived? As the craftsman stewards the fallen tree into new form, refrigerators are a site for locating psychic, emotional, and social fault lines that might become alloyed.
the air is full , 2024
iteration two, seven piece, 2020 - present,
Plywood, mirrors, concrete
21” x 14” x 14”
“For Events” closed this month, providing some space to linger with what it leaves behind. Started in 2020, this prompt “the air is full” was an invitation to consider the saturated air we breathed— the fullness of our lungs, an anxiety of what the air might carry, and more. In 2024, this same invitation asked to listen and commit to what arrives.
Photos arrived regularly— someone in awe of the sky, or a children’s story time, or audience members simply hanging out on the furniture. These objects were plinths, seats, looking glasses, nomadic site markers. They slipped and vibrated between strict definitions. In a poetics of assembled behaviors, they dislodged the rightness of looking as the singular modality.
Pope L was there , in the tributes of his students , collaborators, and co-conspirators. All the energy of rehearsal and its awkward beginnings, the gateways of play; jumping in wrong and strong, delighting in the wrongness.
Echoes drifted in from the Gaza solidarity encampment — often just the murmuring and socializing, sometimes a chanting contributing another layer to the soundscape of birds, cars, and conversation . I can only imagine the sounds of sleep in the moments before dawn as the police approached in their ambush.
An eclipse
******
In conversation with Stockholder’s sculptural stage, Moreno presents “The Air is Full, 2024” (2020-present), a group of seven plywood-and-mirror sculptural pedestals that double as functional seating. These works are dispersed adjacent to “For Events,” extending the platform’s footprint throughout the surrounding courtyard.
Touched to be invited into this celebration to share work. Join us tonight, and in the events to come.
Join us in celebrating the opening of “Jessica Stockholder: For Events” on Monday, April 1st from 5-7PM in Hutchinson Courtyard (rain location: Neubauer Collegium).
The evening will feature presentations in honor of Jessica by art historian Christine Mehring, artist Gabriel Moreno, poet Jeremy Sigler, and composer Augusta Read Thomas. Please note that Thomas will be presenting a world premiere. The program, which also includes a toast to the artist, begins at 5:30pm.
“Jessica Stockholder: For Events” is anchored by a single sculptural stage which encapsulates the artist’s decades-long consideration of how objects encounter one another: how they support themselves and are in turn supported. Over the course of the exhibition, the sculpture will be periodically activated by Stockholder’s former students and colleagues (including Kevin Beasley, Devin T. Mays, Josiah McElheny, Gabriel Moreno, and Anna Tsouhlarakis) and host various forms of engagement by UofC students, faculty, and staff - ranging from impromptu meetings, course discussions, and daily rehearsals to poetry readings, music concerts, and voguing workshops. The exhibition and its accompanying program series “PLATFORM,” will take place in Hutchinson Courtyard from April 1 – May 5, 2024.
“Jessica Stockholder: For Events” is curated by UChicago graduate students Jenny Harris, Clara Nizard, and Michael Stablein, Jr. in partnership with Logan Center Exhibitions and Art in Public Spaces and with the support of colleagues across the University.
An evolving schedule of “PLATFORM” events can be found via the link in our bio
thirty-two years
& a thousand thanks
to my parents
my partner
my friends & community
my body
the land
and this abundance of creativity & intelligence around me
tomorrow isn’t guaranteed and there’s plenty to nurture today peace
POPE L.
He had a way of getting in your head and staying there for a long long time. Sometimes it was comfortable. Often it wasn’t. It always felt with him he had more faith in what people would find in the thick of it all, and less in what people thought they knew. He was a do-er and performer. “Wrong and strong!” I’m grateful he left so much that got into my head and will stay there.
“And that’s the hoo-ha.” Thank you. Rest in power.
“Te Llevaré: Altar for a Mother, a Father, a Father, a Mother” has been installed for about a month and a half. Reflecting on it now during Dia De Muertos, this project and research fills me with gratitude for the collaborations and partnerships that are its wellspring. While it honors four individuals with Alzheimer’s, I’ve found the project has made conversational space to briefly revel in memories with my friends, acquaintances, and even strangers across the world. 🍉 The humanization and life-affirmation that memory provides feels even more essential today. To remember the lives of those being lost is a critical obligation to them, but also what’s required to remain recognizable to ourselves. 🍉
Come check it out at the National Museum of Mexican Art until December 10, 2023. Below is the installation text :
Dia de Muertos is a moment to remember those who have passed and meditate upon our own capacities for memory. The Alzheimer's Association in collaboration with Gabriel Moreno connected with caregivers in 2023 who lost family members to Alzheimer’s/Dementia and listened to their stories. Sharing oral histories, family photographs, and prized objects, they have been assembled into an ofrenda that honors their lives.
Each lived a unique life, yet they shared memory loss: forgetting where they lived, family recipes, and even childrens’ names. To remember home, flavor, and family is to locate ourselves in a recognizable and sensible world. A daughter watched her mother command boardrooms, dining tables, and even city hall— today she leads with the same passion. Another son stoked his father’s memory with favorite songs in the car — now he provides entertainment access in retirement homes as an entrepreneur.
Past lives animate our own. Memory is the fuel for such animation. Through remembering another, we can become a little more recognizable to ourselves.
Dia De Muertos asks us to believe in dissolvable boundaries between the living and dead— to acknowledge our immersion within a world inherited from the many who came before. This belief animates an exchange between who we can remember and who we can be.
Took time for slowness, joy, recuperation, and love. Thankful to be able to do it, and hope you all reclaim your time to feed the soul in any and all the ways. Besos.
Thank you for all the support and new friends 🙏🏽. I bought the plane ticket solo but with 100% confidence friends and family would materialize.
Since TSP I’ve been trying to run with that same kind of belief: trust our interior and exterior worlds will provide. I’m grateful to be able to do this, so I do it. Out here to keep stretching beyond what I thought was possible into what can be.
Chopping down the time little by little.
2:42:44 PR
Big love to @mayajg28 , @escape_to___ , @leeezzz38 , and uncle john.
I honestly don’t even know how to tell y’all about this one, but just want to say:
*there’s magic that comes from embracing paradox and the unreasonable. Everyone and their mother was scared for me to do this, and when I stepped into that space of fear and found comfort in it, I realized the vastness on the other side is where I want to live.
* every.single.time I’ve been with people who find the means to go long together, it is the greatest wealth I’ve found. 14 people traversed the desert, driving around the clock , running through the night, getting chased by madmen, climbing mountains, roaring down them, cooking and caring for each other, sitting in silence in Death Valley, and collecting souls every inch of that race.
* I love these people. Running 340 miles from LA to Las Vegas w/ @7onsundays was beyond my wildest dreams. All gratitude and thanks to the people and energies that made this possible.
@thespeedproject #itwasbetternextyear #nospectators #lalv #norules #thespeedproject
