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Public Sculpture Installation
Description: Parks are imagined as hauntings from the future, with a night-glowing sculpture that conflates indoor and outdoor spaces. The origins of parks and homestead land are reconsidered in a queer futurism, where the colonial present of public space and free land still has troubling consequences for class, gender, and race relations. The audience is confronted with infrastructural, recreational, commercial, and sacred forms of land use.
Materials: glow in the dark material, construction materials, cast-off chairs, white and yellow paint, cinder blocks, concrete, refrigerator, table, dining room chair
Gallery Installation and 4-hour Durational Performance, 7 performers
Description: This work considers social and political consequences of ‘design-by-unit’ furniture created for affordable and disposable convenience. The collected furniture contends with questions of how standardizations reflect on the interior lives of individuals who experience a hyper-mobile, boundaryless, and post-freedom constructs of home. This colorist schematic, embedded in standards of prescribed taste is part of the ecology of home displaced into categories. The title refers to a writing by Czech playwright and reluctant politician Václav Havel, addressing possibility of dissent in a social paradigm where individuals contribute to a post-totalitarian machine.
Materials: cast-off furniture, cell phones with video/sounds of anxiety from each performer’s home, Pantone’s 2024 color of the year “Peach Fuzz,” paint chips of each performer’s color of the year
Collaborative Gallery Installation – Sculpture is 16’X32’X14′
Description: I can be considered a type of architect in this collaboration, where I designed the sculpture and carpeting in conversation with dancer/artist paggett, as well as contributed to other installation aspects including sound and lighting design. There are echoes between land and body: a mountainous mound being, a volcanic lava flow of previously lived with carpets, light and shadow holding reverberations of the past and future, sounds as a mode of navigation. This installation was developed around the body as impacted by notions of land, geological time, and forming as movement-based. This structure is active and contemplative, holding space for dance performances, community meetings, and silence.
Materials: construction materials, ceiling lights, colored gels, sound, carpet, soil, sandbags, cardboard
4-hour Durational Performance
Description: This project attends to bodies displaced from home, on public land, and openly on view. It is a public performance on a roundabout in rural America, where audience members are primarily drivers in vehicles. Some visitors came and sat on chairs and watched the cars. The title of this work comes from Gertrude Stein’s A Novel of Thank You, an existential labor of language published posthumously.
Materials: A roundabout, cast-off dining room chairs, tow straps, work gloves, sunglasses
Solo Exhibition – Installation
Description: 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
Description: As a meditation on the potentials of drawing, I split the world open. The installation space was physically scored in a continuous spatial-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 in 1/2 with a black line in a circumference around my body from top to bottom.
Materials: Crow bar, climbing chalk powder, athletic tape, black line, room, ladder
Solo Exhibition – Installation and Opening Performance
Description: (Interior of Gallery View) This installation and performance 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. The installation was designed from an image of the façade of the Cabrini-Green housing projects as they were being torn down. There is a video on the opposite wall of a round moving video light reminiscent of surveillance practices and technologies.
Materials: repurposed construction materials, sound, video of a floating moon, desk lamps, floating oranges in water, glass containers, house paint, linoleum
Description: (Exterior of Gallery View) Visual boundaries like walls and fences create divides in experience that impact people’s sense of belonging and place within shared geographies. There is a focus on building and unbuilding throughout the exhibition
Materials: Video of water vibrating from construction sounds, dismantled fence from a private home, 4’X6’ digital print of a fence falling apart (on opposite wall not pictured)
Description: Astral Projections 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
Description: I created the 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?
Materials: Carpet, moveable walls, wood support beams, worklights, interactive panels with black acrylic and carpet, cuts into the walls and floor, sounds of static amplified from the space’s electrical wiring
Description: Doors used to create this structure are from local Houston homes torn down and sourced from a salvage recycling facility, remains as pieces of architecture. The rapid gentrification of the 3rd Ward area displaced many local black, queer, and POC populations. The structure is a private space akin to a green room for dancers and audience where they can meet, rest, contemplate, collect research materials and have a private performance space. The structure was created as an interactive and sonic structure, as well as a space for contemplation.
1 hour performance – 5+ hours packing and driving
Description: This extended performative work considers limitations of autonomous travel and practices of gathering, packing, and moving in the city. The public performance included driving with all the chairs strapped to the top of my car through greater Los Angeles. Travel and movement are considered a process that connects points of gathering and the many streets and homes through which chairs travel. There are overlapped sounds of live-feed captured from movements during the performance alongside pre-recorded sounds of chairs being dragged through the streets. This work creates an echo chamber of realities and time-suspensions generated with sound and movement related to the lives that the chairs once lived.
Materials: cast-off chairs, field recordings of chairs dragged on concrete, live-feed looped chair dragging sounds, yellow tie-down straps, my car, driving the streets of LA, A parking lot
Description: This is a soundproof and lightproof sensory deprivation chamber created for 6-8 people to enter together. The structure is based on various types of safe shelters, with the intention that it can be taken apart and move locations. The interior experience considers the effects of sound and visuality in shared spaces. The baffle boxes (on the sides) are programmed and driven to create periodic muffled air circulation for the interior to keep the space breathable. The dirt on the top of the structure was collected from public land and creates an “underground” and cinderblocks raise the structure from possible flooding. These are strategies of construction against possible dangers.
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
Description: This is a public performance that live-streamed on Instagram Live, an aspect central to the structure of the performance as socially mediated and in relationship to surveillance technologies and algorithms of viewing. 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 city. The fabrics are multi-dimensional: a liminal space that can hold a transformation of the body, the pliability of exteriors that occur between the overlapped lives in metropolitan cities, and an impression of the politics of self-portrayal from the unseen lives that previously wore them.
Description: #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
Solo Exhibition – Installation and Performance
Description: 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
EXHIBITION DESIGN: Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)
This exhibition is a retrspective of Beatriz da Costa’s work that engages with art, science, engineering & politics
Design includes: Exhibition Branding in collaboration with the graphic designer, furniture design, wall and floor layout design, reading room, lighting design, production budget management, installation management & mentorship, forensic recreation and interpretation of artworks, video and ephemera for display
Collaborators: Curators, administrators, gallery staff, fabricators, installers
EXHIBITION DESIGN: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) & Pitzer College Art Galleries, Los Angeles
This exhibition features Downey’s early work that engages with interactive machine technologies, performance with dancers, and interactive video, light, and sound feedback systems
Design includes: Exhibition wall layouts for 3 gallery spaces in collaboration with the graphic designer, furniture design, video display designs, large-scale photography design, production budget management, installation management, electronic interactive button-driven sound listening system
Collaborators: Curators, graphic designer, conservationist, gallery staff, fabricators, installers
Kim Zumpfe 