This new work of mine considers and addresses how I view queerness as a combination of reflection and layering, through the use of the color triads Blue-Red-Yellow, and Blue-Pink-Yellow. It is comprised of colored transparent acrylic sculptures hooked up to tactile transducers playing a sound score generated from hate speech and screams of rage, projections, and warped mirror pools.

Partially funded by a Research Grant by Sewanee: The University of the South’s Faculty Research Committee

Re-digested audio. 900 hours of hate speech that is run through a program that randomly samples sections and converts it into abstracted audio, removing the hate and queering it into something that harkens to a future beyond hate.

Vector Overlay Images

Artist Statement

This new work of mine considers and addresses how I view queerness as a combination of reflection and layering.

 1.     How do we use the language, grammar, of color, and gender to constitute ourselves for performance?

 1.1.   The use of the primary colors of red, blue, and yellow to create and understand new colors and relationships does not differ from how we use blue, pink, and yellow to understand gender.

 1.1.1. Layering the coded masculine/feminine over /in conjunction with the masculine/feminine, or combinations of all results in the heightening of features through combinational or oppositional contrast – or transversely creates something new.

1.1.2. Red combined with blue generates a purple. A blue over a yellow one gets green. A blue over a blue leads to a deeper increasing intensity and complexity.

 1.1.2.1. Black the absence of color; white the presence of all colors both create nebulous voids of oppositional understanding in the reading.

 1.1.3. An accurate hard edge can never be drawn around a fuzzy-edged object. 240 poses and poems and XLVII poems lead us no closer to understanding blue nor red but show the breath of the fuzziness of our possibilities of understanding. Could it be that even the purest pigment is still oscillating between electron states?

 1.2.   When we perform, we exist at a praxis of a matrix of unlimited possibilities of expression due to our coding of color and gender.

 1.2.1. Where does queerness and gender conformity exist in the matrix? Where in the layers does a cis-hetero enter and the queer emerges? Where in the layers does the queer enter and the cis-hetero appear? Where in the layers does the cis-hetero leave unchanged? Where in the layers does the queer enter and remain queer?

1.2.1.1. Gephyromania

 2.     Light blocked and obscured by the occlusion of something opaque does not become niellated but remaps itself onto the object, stretching, changing, and ultimately revealing features of its interceptor.

 2.1.   Projection exists without hiding, mapping, and announcing itself onto the world, whilst reflection waits to be disclosed and discovered.

 2.2.   A reflection is only as true as the object which reflects it. Only as true as the light scattering through the pigment suspended in oil of the 17th-century Dutch painting layered upon each other to render life into death.

 3.     In performance are we constituted as a defined being or could we be boundaries encapsulating an amalgamation of layered blurry entities on the edge of utopia?

Bathed in sound and light, present in reflection. Set and remapped, interaction with the work viewer transforms between observer, canvas, and participant. These works are a mix of layered, warped, and engraved color and mirror plexiglass with hard edges playing alongside light works of fuzzy blurred edges – drawing us to consider if the hardness of the edge is more akin to the blurred than the crisp.