Current Exhibition
Fortune 501
April 6th - May 14th, 2021
This exhibition presents interpretations of the “crystal ball,” owned and operated by those reading the palms of current events. Fortune 501 asks the seer to reveal visions of the past, present and future in the form of moving image media. The works included in this exhibition coagulate meditative trance, communications from otherworldly entities, fractal glitches, and glimpses of new and imagined futures. Now light some candles and gaze into your LCD, or OLED if you’re fancy.
New Lament
My first taste of brutal Illinois winter came during lockdown. Isolation took its toll as the landscape grew colder, darker, more barren. COVID-19 pressed the pause button on my whole life, and with nothing left to do but stare out the window and remember what life used to be like, I started to feel a deep connection with the winter unfolding around me. As I slipped further into depression, I watched the green and gold of the grass and trees fade away. I felt like nature and I were becoming dormant together, and I found comfort. The birds soaring outside felt like the perfect opposite of my dancing body caged in isolation. In them I saw resilience, rebirth, freedom. This project, a collage of movement in nature and my choreography, is a visual/visceral meditation on my inner and outer journey through this unrelenting winter.
Other Methods of bearing weight
…follows the death of a loved one by exploring the capacity for film to function as an apparition, and for material intervention on the film negative itself to depict the sensory experience of re-purposing a relationship once one has left their body. Through a series of collective rituals, the performer experiments with placing their body into the disembodied medium of film, composed of light, attempting to meet their loved one across the threshold of materiality by creating spaces for them to take up. 'Other Methods' moves through ceremonies of play and gravity, constructing a visual-temporal language of symbols in an intangible place of meeting. It was made through a careful process of erasure, removing figures from the film by hand in order to allow light to project into their absence, and for direct, performative interaction to take place between the filmmaker and missing figure.
Ormu
As if it were a horror series narrated in real-time, this video presents a mythological and Kafkaesque Nicaragua governed by a couple of malevolents in a time of pandemic, as if that were not enough. In Nicaragua, the confinement started during the protests of April 2018. Due to the police repression, the Ortega-Murillo (ORMU) regime are like the pandemic itself.
For this video I recorded with a microscopic camera the behavior of some microorganisms, as if they were characters. Most of the microbes emerge mainly from my own body, as a performative gesture I collect my own saliva, blood, urine, sperm, dirt from my shoes, etc to put in dialogue with cellulose frames collected of Nicaragua protest scenes.
Fields of the Bygonese
Travelling through landscapes populated by distorted human and alien creatures with a rapidly aging narrator.
In a brown study
Site-specific projection performance. It begins with a projected loop of me in pixilated form writing on a large blackboard, swiveling in my desk chair, and taking various nude poses. Sitting beside the desk where my projected self flickers around, I press a button and start the audio- a round of inversely-progressive digitally degraded readings of dictionary definitions of 'study'. At a certain point, I enter the round. The video ends shortly after completing the final definition of the phrase 'In a Brown Study'- absorbed in one's own thoughts.
a flor singela
This video project was developed in a web residency program (@olhaobarrafunda) during the quarantine. An embroidery floral pattern is recreated in video and each little square of the original image (each stitch) is replaced by a fragment of moving images. All the fragments are excerpts of gay porn videos - it's not explicit, but bit's possible to notice a body movement in the video. "A simple flower" deals with the handcraft works aesthetic, mostly associated with woman crafts in the past, and infiltrates a queer material on it. It's a research about what are the desires hidden behind the gestures and images, how an image is composed and how the popular images that are reproduced in craftworks reproduce gender stereotypes.
obnubilatura
obnubilate: clouded in fog, hazy; disoriented state of mind
obnubilatura: subjective exploration of confusion as a (self-)induced state
Physical presence is circumstantial. My physicality in this performance excerpt is the cumulative presence of the apparatus consisting of tools, space, body, and consciousness. The objects in my system share my physicality in a distorted self-imaging process where the “I” is my self and the context that my self and my tools synergize. Physicality becomes a double negative of itself, with the presence of each component revealing itself as it is obscured in its own shadow. The performance is an exploration of the emotional threshold between psychologically manageable and unmanageable states/forms, one installment in a series of performances partially inspired by the autotheoretical project of Adrian Piper’s "Food for the Spirit" (1971). The piece questions the function and purpose of physical and conceptual boundaries, animating a mode of viewership which retroactively displaces my subjective experience inside my own work. I combine aesthetic qualities of film and analog projection with high-resolution digital video to elicit a sense of time that is both self-affirming and self-obscuring, spreading in all directions like an emission of light.
Green Miracle (remastered)
This video was screened at the Bio-Safari TM (A division of Harrison-Fleischer Labcorps) trade show on Terra Station Epsilon in 2037
💞❣️💖💝💕💜❤️💗💟💘💓💟
*Warning: Visuals may trigger those with epilepsy or sensitivity to flickering lights.
Zero sum sitting - academic version 3
In this work the mechanical structures of these institutional chairs are tied together, creating a complex system of precarious balance and instability. The competition to dominate the position of this piece goes on until almost complete collapse of the linked structure.
This video describes the self-centered actions inherent in human relationships. We will undo what someone else has done to benefit ourselves, just to see it undone for someone else’s advantage in the future.
a cold read
A Cold Read is an echo chamber between strangers meeting each other for the first time on zoom. This project explores the performative aspects of conversation. After having two people introduce themselves to each other and recording their conversation, I converted the dialogue into a script for others to then act out and re-perform. Session II was a conversation about death and loss between an artist living in Connecticut and a scientist based in Texas, which was then re-performed by eight others.