Portfolio Overview (20 images)

framing of a space that waits imagines park landscapes as hauntings from the future, where a night-glowing upsidedown house and foundation conflate indoor and outdoor spaces. The origins of parks and homestead land are reconsidered in a queer futurism that recognizes a colonial and indigenous present, where histories of public space and free land still has troubling consequences for class, gender, and race relations. The audience is confronted with relationships to various forms of land use whether infrastructural, recreational, commercial, and sacred.

Materials: glow in the dark material, construction materials, cast-off chairs, white and yellow paint, cinder blocks, concrete, refrigerator, table, dining room chair

I created the design and installation for the sculpture(s) in conversation with collaborator taisha paggett, as well as contributing to other aspects of the exhibition including lighting and sound. This installation was developed around the body as impacted by notions of land, geological time, and forming as movement-based. There are echoes between land and body: a mountainous mound being, a volcanic lava flow made of carpets, continuous light and shadow streaming through steps, sound as a mode of navigation. This space is active and contemplative, taking on the potentials and risks of making place.

Materials: construction materials, ceiling lights, colored gels, sound, carpet, soil, sandbags, cardboard

4-hour Durational Performance
This project attends to bodies displaced from home, on public land, and openly on view. It is a public performance on a roundabout in a rural area. Audience members are primarily drivers in vehicles, and some people came and sat on chairs and watched the cars. The title of this work comes from Gertrude Stein’s A Novel of Thank You.

Materials: A roundabout, cast-off dining room chairs, tow straps, work gloves, sunglasses

Solo Exhibition & Curated Series of Performances
This architectural gallery intervention splits the space horizontally into an upper level and a subterranean level. This split realigns control over bodily visibility including hiding, avoidance, evasion and other strategies to counteract coercive social and political relations. The raised open floor of the installation has unfinished constructs of domesticity. The subterranean offers a temporary retreat, dimly lit by videos of blue suns and with resting cushions. There is a focus on shared social gestures in this exhibition – resting, having tea, ascending & descending.

Materials: Construction materials, stripped-down couch, cinder blocks, video of a recreation area, photographs of eaten fruit, resting cushions, videos of blue suns, blue paint, love letters, a black hole.

3-hour Performance
I split the world open. The installation space was physically scored in a continuous circular line with a crow bar starting on the floor, behind a 12’ false gallery wall, up onto the ceiling, and back down to the floor again. I similarly marked myself, splitting myself with a black line in a circumference around my body.

Materials: Crow bar, climbing chalk powder, athletic tape, black line, room, ladder

This installation and performance work are rooted in potentials of still life: fruit, products, waste, leftovers, queer shapes and sounds situated in relationship to the ownership of materials and land. Visual boundaries like walls and fences create divides in experience that impact people’s sense of belonging, place, and behavior within shared geographies. The installation was designed from an image of the façade of the Cabrini-Green housing projects as they were being torn down. The round moving video light is reminiscent of surveillance practices and technologies.

Materials: repurposed construction materials, sound, 2 videos, desk lamps, floating oranges in water, glass containers, house paint, linoleum, dismantled fence, digital print of a fence

Yaanga and the not yet addresses parallel material histories of indigenous Yaanga and Los Angeles, and the complexities of bodies living on shared land. Sand from the coast seeps through a partially torn down wall, dirt and plants are from the border of Seal Beach military land, and looped videos show areas around the edges of the local landscape. The red anti-architectures have the potential to be moved and interacted with as flexible structures.

Materials: torn down wall, sand and shells collected from beaches, dirt and plants collected from the border of military land, looped videos of light in the local Los Angeles/Yaanga lands, sandbags, anti-architectures

5-year project: Los Angeles 2015, Houston and Austin 2016, Toronto 2019     
In collaboration with taisha paggett, Ashley Hunt, and dance company WXPT

I created the primary physical installation, architectural interventions, and sculptural panels as a form of choreographic space, curricular structure, and pedagogical home for the dance company WXPT, who performed and taught classes in the installation. The overall space of each exhibition was imagined as a body itself, with fabric, holes, and cuts in the space as institutional interventions. A hole opened in the ground (not pictured here) was meant to open up histories, origins, and expose the dirt as a foundation. Structured through a variety of queer and racial theoretical positions, the work engages with the question, What is a black dance curriculum today?

This structure was built from homes torn down as a result of gentrification in the local area in Houston that displaced black and queer populations. It was created as a place of rest, gathering, private & public performance, and contemplation for the dancers and audience.

The climbing structure references concepts of ascendance, gravity, and an unstable surface, and the interior was envisioned as a green room where dancers could gather materials, research, and audience/dancers could rest and escape from the external space of the exhibition and performance areas.The treatment of lighting was particularly important in each exhibition, with worklights highlighting traces and shadows that moved through the space with the performative objects and dancers.

3-hour performance
The weight of gravel is pulled through hallways. This metropolitan building is taken up as a mythological space that reflects overlapping and inconsistent spaces where bodies travel in the city without a clear design or destination. This durational performance engages with relations between extraction of natural resources, sounds of material collisions, and photographic images (placed on walls) that represents disparate but connected locations.

Materials: gravel, ropes, photographs of spaces of travel in Los Angeles, colored paper, fabric, construction gloves, 2-floors of a building in downtown Los Angeles

This interactive sculpture is a soundproof and lightproof sensory deprivation chamber that can hold 6-8 people. The structure is based on various types of safe shelters, and considers the effects of light and visuality in shared spaces. The dirt on the top of the structure that creates an “underground” was collected from public land.

Materials: Soundproofing and construction materials, cushioning, athletic fabric, cinder blocks, baffle boxes, soil collected from public land, shoe mat

3-hour Performance in collaboration with Wilawan Wiangthong, via IG Live

Simultaneously on and around the Bangkok and Los Angeles Metro Rail systems, each performer enacts tensions between fabrics and body as resistant and non-conforming behavior in relation to the constructs of the city. Fabrics are intended as multi-dimensional: a liminal space that can hold a transformation of the body within the limits a city, the pliability of exteriors that occur between the overlapped lives within metropolitan cities, and an impression of the politics of self-portrayal from the unseen lives that previously wore them. Instagram live-streaming was central to the structure as socially mediated and in relationship to contemporary surveillance technologies and algorithms.

#homingdevices is a series of exercises that offer new relationships to social and political concepts of home that can be expressed in body, action, and physical materials provided through the interweave of the internet and virtual space. These sound/event scores are based on the phenomena and externalization of phasmographic spaces of the mind and anxieties around the home as a destabilized location. This series is posted occasionally on social media.

Materials: Instagram Digital postings (size not applicable)

Lump Projects consists of a 40-foot hallway, lumps, four video projections, and a series of 20 photographs installed inside the corridor. The photographic work and exhibition were produced from an online email conversation with strangers, an exercise vulnerability and exchange. Each conversation led to the production of a photograph with the lump that was then returned to the individual in discussion. The photographs are displayed inside the hallway. The light from the video projectors fade in and out as they capture the contour of the lump, creating a changing landscape of light.

Materials: Construction materials to create a 40’ hallway, fluorescent lights, four video projections of fading light, a series of 20 photographs installed inside corridor, lumps