on legibility
This website is a little bit about me getting better at playing this motherfucking (and I do love a good motherfucker) game. I do work all day everyday. And right now, until now, I’ve got nothing to show for it.
I right now have an opportunity to sign with a gallery, to show at Miami Art Week. I right now got a meeting set up with a curator at a museum and I right now don’t have inventory or a website representative of the work I do. This was my invitation to make this website.
Because, actually, I do have the work. The thing is that I was using the wrong categories for filing the work as work. I was thinking that my work needed to look like the work I am told is valuable instead of knowing that my work is valuable and expanding the goddamn category for work. I say goddamn because god is another category that needs expansion.
I’ve been a working artist for my whole godblessed adult life (longer than that, but I think you get my point). I think every sentence I write is somewhat absurd and a total lie or, at the very least, a partial truth and it isn’t because I’m lying like it sounds like I’m saying. It’s just that any translation of pure existence is partial and I get all the fuck tangled up in my own language web. Which is nice because I live in a body and this body loves hammocks. I’m finally learning to relax into this.
This website is a container for my labor, a little sling hung between two trees to hold my body (of work). This website is not representative of my work, it is the work. And so is this word, and this one, and this one. This website is a silly category, like words, like any constructed construct. The separations are arbitrary, but okay, I get it, they’re helpful. Until they aren’t and then we have to remember that we made the dividing lines up.
Anyway, all that to say, I haven’t been good at owning what I do and showing what I do and profiting from what I do (well, I’m a little bit good at it sometimes), in large part, because my work is about care, about relationship, belonging, and making home. It’s the thing that doesn’t get pay off in our current economic set up. I’ve internalized all sorts of things about the work that I do. I haven’t thought what I do is worthy but I’m changing that. I am never satisfied with my work because nothing ever feels complete and that’s what’s good/bad about me, that’s one of the particulars that I contribute to our whole so I’m owning that now and I’m sharing it here. I love you. That’s how come I’m here.
one of the many iterations of my studio at SAIC (2022)
