and love was a burning fence about my house, solo exhibition.

“For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from

within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor

the merely safe.” - audre lorde 

 

         and love was a burning fence about my house is driven by ideas asserted in audre lorde’s 1978 essay Uses of the Erotic, Apologies to the People of Lebanon and Do You Do Well to Be Angry? by June Jordan, a final scene from The People Under the Stairs (1991), and the theory that violence we accept in our personal lives primes us to accept the same on the larger world stage. Lordes’ definition of the erotic as a source of power sets the stage for navigation of jordans’ writing on transparency and relentlessness in the face of personal and global atrocities. When we learn to see experiencing full pleasure in ourselves as shameful, who does it harm? Where does that harm ripple? How does learning to accept only the richest versions of our private lives inform what we accept in every facet of our lives beyond our most intimate spaces? Where on the spectrum of full pleasure do anger, grief and acknowledgement of complicity lie? What does it look like to live a life that surrenders to never having finite answers, but finding replenishment in the constant strive to reach them anyway?

         This body of work is intended to document a continual navigation of personal, communal and global grief, loss, dissatisfaction, anger and vulnerability. A collection of resin cast sinks with mollusk shells, works on paper ranging in size from 8 to 30” inches wide, original audio recording and remixed boardgame material illustrate intimate and vulnerable tools for grounding and catalysts to act in courage. In an effort to hold trial-and-error in reverence, still visible sketch lines, paint that escapes outlines, and displaying work using materials I have very little comfort or experience with are just as much of a focus as the sum of the parts. Defining the relationship between the erotic, love and refusal of despair as tools of fortification, I intend to make space for us to demand more from ourselves and the institutions we navigate, as well as dream up and implement adaptive technologies as escape routes and instructive models.