on the past

talk?

I sat down to write some pretentious shit about art, but two minutes in I got a text that my friend got hit by a car. She’s okay–she’s okay, I know she’s okay–but the art has flown straight from my head.

connection issues

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prophesy

I attended two churches growing up, one Southern Baptist and one Presbyterian. Both of these denominations are pretty straight-laced when it comes to supernatural experiences. We didn’t have New Age spiritual practices like faith healing or speaking in tongues, or even historical mystic traditions like invoking saints and transubstantiation. What we did have were gifts of the Holy Spirit. Classified into manifestational, functional, and vocational callings, the list of gifts ranged from wisdom to intercession to administration to healing. I was automatically classified into “acts of service” as a teenage girl on the worship team. But the gift I took most pride in was prophecy: the ability to speak God’s word through divine inspiration.

Unfortunately it’s not as cool as it sounds. Our church believed that genuine miracles stopped happening in the first century A.D.. Without the supernatural aspect, it just meant I was good at saying things people needed to hear. That said, the ordinary magic of communication was not something I took for granted as someone who’d been non-verbal until preschool, and I’d been actively studying how to work a room since then. Combined with unwavering conviction, basic empathy, and a complete inability to keep my mouth shut, I had the perfect recipe for words of the Spirit. I could tell any amount of stories about being approached for advice by adults, or convincing middle schoolers that God will love them if they “struggle with homosexuality,” or giving testimonies about the Lord working through the vessel of my body as I dissociated my way through high school.

The more interesting uses for these skills, though, have been outside the cult. I’ve found that within an artistic practice, the conviction and self-assurance I developed translate into a striking ability to bring ideas into existence through sheer willpower. Is making art mystical? Is it prophetic? Is it psychological? Is it not that deep? It sure feels miraculous: I have made things, with my own hands, out of scraps, that have paved my way through universities, taken me to new cities, brought me money and respect and authority and family, shown the people around me worlds beyond their experience. Answers lose their purpose after a while. I’d rather just do my work and ask questions later.

Episode 27 (Edited)

Dream 10/16

I saw my great-grandmother in a dream a week ago. She was living in a commune with my great-aunt (accurate) and my shitty grandfather and step-grandmother (not accurate), packing a wardrobe full of lovely cocktail dresses for the nursing home. I was on the run for breaking into an Orthodox chapel, so I ran right past her into a pasture of sheep and forgot the whole thing. But as I was falling asleep last night I felt her so clearly, right behind my solar plexus. She was there, dark-haired and sepia-toned, listed as her husband’s housekeeper in the 1950 Census while he shacked up with her teenage cousin, probably miserable but so solidly there that I could see how my family had survived long enough– down through my grandmother’s shitty marriages to suicidal men, down through my mother’s forty years of brainwashing by evangelical gender theory–for me to become a dyke.

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on the future

Manifesto

The goal of my current studio practice is to reclaim traditionally feminine art forms from the racist and misogynist separation of fine art and craft, by reinterpreting ephemeral moments in popular culture through a queer feminist theoretical framework.

(I am making Star Trek fanart).

Dream 6/27

I dreamt last night that I was part of a planetary survey party from a spaceship on a deep space expedition. We were exploring the foggy, craggy landscape of our destination world when we were taken prisoner by our doppelgängers (like in the movie Us). The facility they took us to was endless, full of underground concrete warehouses with medical equipment and thin wire headsets that resembled vintage dental equipment. The prisoners were test subjects in an incomprehensible scientific-industrial complex, subjected to medical torture–one was strapped into a chair and forced to trace their own pain spasms on a chart like a lie detector, but their pen was hooked up to an IV in their arm that drew their own blood as ink. If you resisted, if you so much as attempted to speak with other hostages, you’d have a limb amputated on the spot. An urgent, life-or-death plot was unfolding to communicate under the guards’ noses with cafeteria forks.

Human Rights

• Right to unreadability
• Right to privacy
• Right to grow up
• Right to abstraction
• Right to immaturity
• Right to fearlessness
• Right to unmarketability
• Right to materiality
• Right to defiance
• Right to refuse

Revolution

As part of my research about contemporary science fiction’s utopian impulse to revisit the aesthetics of 1960’s B-movies, I am now performing a Wikipedia deep dive about Teletubbies, a cult classic children’s TV show of my generation. My show-stopping thesis: Teletubbies was the most groundbreaking piece of science fiction to come out of the 1990’s. The show was created because its producers at BBC were concerned about how the rapid technological progress of the 1990’s was affecting young children. Andrew Davenport, the writer, had grown up watching the moon landing in 1969 and, after noticing that the astronauts’ movements in their spacesuits were very toddler-like due to mobility constraints, recognized a way to bridge the gap between children and technology. His and television producer Anne Wood’s strategy was to ease children’s anxiety by reflecting their early developmental experiences with tech back to them. A “language” was developed for the show based on children’s emergent speech patterns, and the main characters watched human children on television screens in their stomachs to imply that the TV’s relationship to the audience was reciprocal. Their home was a spoof of the spaceship in Doctor Who (another cult-classic sci-fi that was airing reruns on BBC), but constructed in bright materials with cheerful, rounded architecture. The characters even kept a googly-eyed vacuum cleaner, that last bastion of everyday technological terror, as a pet to prove they could be “friendly.”

This was an act of empathy so earnest that Teletubbies became one of the most controversial shows in the history of children’s media. Critics and parents derided the show for everything from being annoying, to “being a bad influence,” to actively delaying children’s development. The production team had to build tents on-site to protect its crew from paparazzi. Developmental psychologists hated the show, and I can confirm that it was banned from my family’s home as my autistic toddler self was learning to speak. But I loved it, and so did friends my age; they’d all grown up on it too. It’s undeniable that rewatching the show as an adult was an uncomfortably surreal experience. It resurfaced a disturbing, long-forgotten sensory experience that the majority of adults have had, and the further removed you are from childhood the more uncanny it becomes. I’m inclined to think that’s what made it good art: it “com- forted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.” Either way, debates over the show raged in major news outlets for months, only relenting when Princess Diana’s death hit the headlines.

Devolution

I’m in my childhood bedroom and the lights are off, except for the warm glow from under my closet door. I open the door: the closet is shallow but long, shoved in the space between my wall, a window, and my parents’ bedroom. It stretches on for miles of contact paper flooring and scuffed walls, and I spend the whole night wandering down the hallway. The walls are hung with bright pink neon signs with letters that don’t spell out anything. There’s supposed to be a fourth wall at the other end, where the house ends and the window begins, but I never find it.

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appendix

notes for a project brief

Physical investigation: power + living/once-living material + conductivity

• Power defined by compression and/or expression, animation of existing system and/or introduction of chaos (inward vs outward motion)
• Living material is remnant of another once-closed system/organism
• Conductivity connects/closes circuit between power and living to function
• Think father/son/holy spirit
• 1/0/? – living/inert/potentiality

The roles of the parts determined by relationality NOT by essence – any part can play any role in different systems

Triads (two materials plus power) defined by two transitive sets of relationships:

• Contrast/polarity vs reconciliation – (unlike x unlike) x internal relationship
• Likenesses vs the other – (like x like) x external contradiction

Triads defined by three sets of relationships:

• Life x power, conductivity x power, life x conductivity

Notes:

• Power can be literal or narrative/archetypical/ abstract
• Living materials are components of body or product/projection of body (embodiment vs evidence)
• Conductivity can be memetic flow of thought, or mathematical variables (conceptual placeholders)
• Combinations can operate via logic and/or proximity