Like many queers of my generation, I relocated from an inland town to coastal cities to find acceptance. I found community in nightclubs and DIY intersectional art and activist spaces. As these coastal cities become more expensive, vulnerable to climate change, and pandemics, my queer artist community has scattered. We’ve been displaced from our centralized neighborhoods and are sprinkled throughout the boroughs. Some of us have left these cities entirely. Sometimes it feels like a wave came and displaced my community and I am left playing with their discarded false eyelashes, wigs, and neon-colored dicks. Other times, we reunite and create together—and it is fantastic. My work reflects both the grief of this displacement and the joyous collaboration.
I work across photography, projection, installation, printmaking and bio-art. My process mimics the tide, elements come in, are assembled and then break apart to come together again in new forms. A discarded wig from a collaborative photoshoot will be left in the tide to collect detritus. I then sculpt and make monoprints from this tangle of hair and flotsam. The queer ecology of the sea is present in my work; I feel a kinship with bivalves whose gender fuckery goes against our socially imposed binary and who provide essential ecosystem services for other creatures, which I liken to queer and femme labor.
I began my Eyelash Grass project to work through my grief following the Pulse Night Club Shooting and the Ghost Ship Fire, a fire that took the lives of 36 people in an artist space in the Bay Area community I came of age in. In this installation I submerged false eyelashes and synthetic hair in a tank of seawater mounted on cinder blocks. The eyelashes were suspended by touch and migrated within the tank bringing strands of hair with them. They formed webs of connection and grew algae. I’ve installed the tank in exhibitions and photographed the changes. These photographs often appear in my installations, and as stand-alone works.
Materials that signify being a queer femme to me are a constant in my work. They are my safe water markers, beacons to find other femmes during tumultuous times.
More recently, I’ve been grieving my brother who was killed by gun violence. In thinking about the role of breath and shared oxygen, both in the pandemic and in the streets during walks for Black lives, I discovered algae. During moments of despair and struggle to locate joy in a heavy world, algae quietly creates oxygen that calms and feeds our bodies. I make polymers from sea algae and dye them with pigments used to make shimmery eyeshadows. I cast them thick so they can respond to their environment. They cry and sweat and bleed when the air is humid. I also culture and maintain live marine algae in femme signifying vessels. Algae provides over half the air we breath, which feels poignant during this time when we are thinking so much about breath and how our relationships to breathing are not equal.