A Day for Dreaming,
A Day for Doing,
2021 - Ongoing
I know there is power in watching people make things work because this kind of observation has been my biggest teacher in life. I grew up foraging, gardening, learning to build and stoke fires, be around large animals, carry heavy things, assess danger, and play everywhere. I was raised to take care of animals and the earth and people, but not really given a guide. This is why I am currently spending time in the studio with a new exhibition—A Day for Dreaming, A Day for Doing—that guides us through a transformative passage into an alternate reality centered around caring for each other.
Whether embodied through performance or illustrated through drawings or textiles, A Day for Dreaming, A Day for Doing shares my process of trying out, thinking out, and falling out in order to recognize, commiserate, and celebrate that building a life is a collaborative process. The Local Portals performances are designed as intense physical experiences requiring personal agility and stamina. For example, in Illusions and Portals, I performed for several hours, attempting to harness the velocity of the wind to hold fabric against my body. As a camera captured my hurried collaboration with the wind, each performance was only a millisecond long. Through this training and practice, my body learned something new and a Local Portal was created.
This work responds to my ever-present feelings of grief, despair, and fear around political collapse, social despondence, and the rapidly deteriorating climate. To combat panic, I find myself conjuring situations and images that allow for a transformation of mind, body, and spirit. Many of my “solutions” rely on absurdism to bend our minds and consider different ways of living. It is important to me that these solutions are makeshift—temporary bridges fashioned out of the resources at hand. Studio experiments, performances, and drawings on paper and cloth are designed to help us think about different ways of living and approaching our intimate and societal relationships through care.