2019
Yellow for Joan is an installation loop excerpted from a longer collaborative video (with Dani ReStack), Go Ask Joan. The video installation (with Dani ReStack) is an immersive sculptural space shifting from literal representation via video projection, to abstraction when the image disappears and the light from the projector emphasizes the construction of the set.
The photograph as static representation fails to capture my relationship to place, identity, or experience of time. I want to make it speak as a medium of the body, through the body. I use strategies of body contact, cumulative marks and gestural iterations, to generate an ongoing index of imprint. I hope that the obstruction of the body, the rubbings of the land, and the fragments that are generated can create a path towards improbable monuments; to the time in between time, the identity in between identities, the hovering of multiples.
These photo sculptural works are begun by attaching photo paper to my feet, then going about my day. When I am done, I develop them in the darkroom where they reveal marks of light, contact, and wear through the photographic material. The work was begun in the period after becoming a mother; as a gesture towards documenting the in between of identities and often undocumented moments as I moved through studio, dropoff, playdate, work, students, home, artist, mother, lover, teacher, friend, artist, mother lover, child, mentor. The photograph became a way to make proof of the continuance of the body between states.
The resulting image is a cumulative mark of time and place – a photographic sculptural encounter that physically holds my experience as queer artist, lover, mother while also crafting it as a new provisional structure. The works lean, or balance improbably, on the floor, on top of cement structures, on wooden platforms. These precarious balances hold the proof, the remnants, the newly made form.
“The second in a planned trilogy of films about desire and domesticity that began with Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017), Come Coyote examines issues around queer reproduction, intimacy, and motherhood. Collaborators and partners Dani and Sheilah ReStack capture in fleeting, diaristic images the tender and terrifying feelings they have around ushering new life into the world, conveyed with both humor and a powerful immediacy. “
Text from Projections, NYFF 2019 catalogue
Trailer for Come Coyote. For more information contact the Video Data Bank.
