Failure To Thrive

There is some peace, some power, in knowing that an object “doesn’t work” and finding

joy in it anyway. Acting without use soothes me, gives me permission to be useless, to

fail.

All things should have a right to exist without use.

That last statement feels too bold and too certain to be true, and I fli nch as I wait for retaliation. I’m trying the thought out anyway.

If it is useless, so be it.

 

Failure To Thrive is a gathering place for my works, which fail practically even if they succeed formally. The assembly is made in the hopes that in displaying my shame, others can feel more comfortable with their own. I am convinced that, left alone, our shame corrodes inside of us. Aired out among others, it is transmuted into community and self compassion.

 

Failure is a concern for all artists, and all citizens – individually and globally, projects fail, be they a painting or a social institution.

Failure is especially a concern for those who are not included in the language of success spoken by western, white-oriented capitalism. Failure is inevitable for someone who is fundamentally excluded from the language of achievement – a language of heterosexual, cisgendered, thin, white, able-bodied, and capitalistic success.

 

At their simplest, the failed objects I reflect on when creating make me laugh. At their most complex, they challenge me to redefine success, to worldbuild, to reimagine parameters. They make me ask how I know when something has failed, whose eyes I’m looking through when I pity something. Whose definitions of failure and success have I internalized? How will I know if I’ve won? Are winners and losers even functional categories anymore, when we are running a race with no finish line?

 

Failure To Thrive does not claim to have answers. The show’s goal is not to assert itself as a new metric for success. It hopes only to carve out a space, a moment, in which we can enjoy what communal failure has to offer: a chance for relief, compassion, and a new kind of optimism.