Experiments made from algae during this pandemic. I dye them with pigments extracted from algae and with cosmetic grade mica powder used to make shimmery eyeshadows. I cast these materials thick so they react to their environment. They are imbued with emotion. They cry and sweat and bleed when it rains. Algae provides over half of the air we breathe during a time when we are collectively thinking about how our relationships to breathing are not equal. These are materials tests for new works to come.

Rise Up Kingston Grassroots Fund Drive

June 15th-June29th 2021

I am taking custom commissions for lung prints in exchange for donations in any amount to Rise Up Kingston. The prints come from a deep place for me. I’ve been making them while thinking about our unequal relationships to breath. Rise Up Kingston is a grassroots organization that works on housing justice, is committed to defunding the police and works towards a world without prisons. It is led by those experiencing racism, classism and gender oppression.

Click here to make your donation and order a print

In early 2020, right before the pandemic hit, I completed a residency at MASS MoCA where I incorporated printmaking into my practice and created the Tidewrack installation.

My Tidewrack installation was shown at SomoS Art House in Berlin in a show called “Futureless” curated by Oliver Dougherty in Fall of 2020.

Tidewrack refers to the evolving space on the shoreline where the mixture of seaweed and synthetic materials are deposited by a receding tideline. This creative tangle may survive—churned and changed—or be decimated and swept out to sea. The tidewrack is temporary, collaborative and evolving.

The video depicts queer artists and activists from my community frolicking with wigs and struggling to stay upright in the tide on Riis Beach. It is projected through a tank containing saltwater, causing the light to refract and rainbow and the image to split into three color channels. The sound is made from gritty recordings captured of waves underneath the sand and a ship’s distress signal-meant to forewarn of something unknown that is to come.

Elements are made from the wigs shown in the video. The sculptural element is made from hair left in the tide to attract detritus at Riis Beach. It picked up bits of shell, fish bones and a bracelet. The monoprints are printed from the synthetic hair and wig caps. The viewers at first mistake them for sea creatures but on closer inspection realize they are still looking at wig detritus.

Still documentation of the Tidewrack refracted video projections that I created while in residence at Vermont Studio Center in October 2019.

Site-specific installation made while in residence on Governors Island in Spring/Summer 2019 that was part of the Castaway’s exhibit in an abandoned house on Colonel’s Row. This was the Alumni Show for School of Visual Arts curated by Mark Ramos. Collaborative portrait of Dust Tea Shoulders.

I started working with false eyelashes, synthetic hair and seawater in winter of 2016 to work through my grief following the Ghost Ship Fire that took the lives of 36 people in an artist collective in the Bay Area community I came of age in. The work is very much related to displacement of queer artists to spaces that are often precarious. Inspired by that which brought comfort—queer femme signifiers and seagrass on Fire Island—eyelashes and hair are submerged in a tank suspended by touch. They migrate, form new connections and grow algae.

Eyelash Grass was installed as part of "A Dark Rock Surged Upon" curated by Faheem Haider at Garner Arts Center in New York in June 2017. The public was allowed a rare primary experience with the tank and to view the changes during the time the exhibition was installed.

Also pictured: "Panic Room: A Safe Space for Reflection on the Value of Black Lives" by Tiffany Smith.

In this more playful work I attached ropes and buoys to wigs and sex toys and placed them in the sea on an oysterfarm to attract seaweed and sea creatures. I photographed the changes. I explored the kinship I feel with macroalgaes and bivalves and drew correlations between the labor they provide by mitigating nitrogen to the labor so many in my queer community put towards working for social change.

Ongoing collaborative portraits made with fellow queer artists and creatives exploring how to simultaneously mourn and hold celebration.

Portraits made with Little Villa, Nath Ann Carrera, Melzina Canigan, ektor garcia, Donna Dolore and Ciriza

Environmental portraits made from 2009-2011 of friends and creative collaborators Ciriza, ektor garcia, Sky Hall, Joy, Rachel Styer, Lorelei Lee, Sinclair, Tuck Mayo and Amos Mac.

A collaboration with San Francisco artists including Ciriza, Raul de Nieves, Xara Thustra, Siobhan Aluvalot, Brande Bytheway. We ran around the city erecting these fake nature backdrops performing in front of them and inviting the public to participate.

Documentations of our collaborations and creative endeavors in Queer San Francisco where I had my coming of age in the early 2000’s. It was a wild and special time. We could make art in the streets. If you had an idea for a project you put the word out and the next day 50 queers would show up to make it with you. This time was fleeting. The city became too expensive and most of us fled. Recently, I was feeling sad about this displacement and my friend ektor cheered me up by saying “but now we are everywhere.” It’s true. Even though we are scattered those of us still living are very connected. Some of the artists pictured include Brontez Purnell, Raul de Nieves, Annie Danger, Lee Reyes, Ivy Jeanne, Xara Thustra, Rhani Remedes, Jesse Evans, Siobhan Aluvalot and Ciriza