What is possible here is to hold the entirety of existence in a single seed between your thumb and forefinger. To look out on a vast expanse of space and discover all at once the utter nothingness and terrible importance of everything: all that you know, don’t know, and are unaware of. An impenetrable darkness, a grid of light, a sense of belonging, humility, a curved line, warmth, weightlessness.
The obsolescence of language: the shape of your mouth as it forms a word is the shape of your body held by the space around it. You were never born. You have always existed. The translucent barrier between past and future is your reflection in a body of water as you enter it. A sea change. Timelines collapse. {italics and indented formatting for this section please}
time is a rubber band… is a multimedia installation of projected environments, immersive sound, and interactive sculpture. Based on ethereal visions and transcendental experience, the installation challenges us to expand our notions of what it means to be human: how we are now, how we have been in the past, and what we could be in the future. In my work I am investigating embodiment as a strategy for liberation. I identify the body as the interface through which we connect to the earth, each other, and a cosmic interdimensionality both beyond and within ourselves. In the initial video cycle, I invite viewers to lie down on pillows and look at a projection of the trees from below that begins with a meditative rhythmic soundtrack. Slowly, as in a waking dream, the sounds intensify and the projections appear on the surrounding walls, transporting the viewer first into the sky, and then into an alternate dimension. Haptic components accompanying the sounds direct somatic attention by means of vibrations, allowing the participant to move seamlessly through changes in psycho spatial reality while maintaining body awareness. It is my goal in this space to create the possibility for embodied change.
In December of 2016 I was a witness to a warehouse fire in Oakland California, that took the lives of thirty-six people, and devastated a network of close-knit creative communities that I was deeply involved in. Shattered by grief, I came together with a small group of other bereaved artists to raise money for the financially vulnerable people affected by this tragedy. At the same time, I was fortunate to already have been receiving therapy that included energy work and somatic modalities. After the fire I began working with a variety of metaphysical tools, and connecting with my ancestors. During my healing sessions I started to have out-of-body experiences, where I traveled to extra-dimensional locations and was assisted by ethereal beings. Through this work I began to heal. When I came to SAIC in the fall of 2021 I started to compile the years of notes about these encounters and visions, and the very first thing I did in my studio was to draw a map extrapolated from them. I then set about creating a set of haptic, immersive video installations in which I invite the viewer into the map, to experience with me an embodied, expansive, and regenerative journey through time and space.
The entanglement of timelines and the mutability of spatial dimensions permeates this work. In a series of multi-channel projected videos I step out of my body and cross between worlds, coming to my own aid in a past life as an aquatic being in an oceanic world, collapsing a timeline in which she meets an untimely demise. Lush landscapes are paired with otherworldly sounds, and populated by the artifacts of metaphysical archaeology. A feedback loop is created between the expanding portal of digital space in the projected environment and the physicality of sculptural objects that encompass the body. I seek to create an opening in this space to access and unlock knowledge encoded in our DNA, in our queer quantum patterning1 of how to heal ourselves and the world we are inextricably a part of. I want to uncover an intra-species knowledge that precedes the Anthropocene, the memory of what it was like to be in the womb; to be a single-celled organism when the earth was covered in water. Like the repetition of waves on the shore, with the envelopment of looping hypnotic sensorial stimuli, I attempt to erode the boundaries between past and future, self and other, body and environment.
1) “Queer quantum patterning” and “intra-species” are concepts from Barad, K. (2012). Nature’s Queer Performativity*. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1-2). {footnote formatting please as with the 1 above}
