Works made for No! I am No Singular Instrument, curated by Samuel Kenswil for Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
“Built environments sculpt and erode us, permeable and penetrable. Architecture and signage move us through structures erected to suit flows of capital first, and people perhaps somewhere down the line. Notice your chair: is your spine in a C or S formation? Design molds us into shapes; so do politics, expanding or limiting our range of motion.
Bodies are highlighted by absence: those left out of history and images, deemed applicable for negation, or willingly eschewing representation. LGBT people are made absent by a legacy of death, visible in shuttered social spaces, looming in self-conception.
Taxonomies expand and contract as ethics shift. We anthropomorphize flora and fauna which lack lingual vocal cords. The real estate of your presence is always a development opportunity: the material of flesh changeable through repetitive exertion. Are you unsettled by the proximity of you to the things around you? How did you end up looking so much like your room?
Meaning changes from context to context; so do you. You spread your/selves out like limbs do.
There is a persistent attempt to gather visual markers as a cohesive subjectivity, a whole person made ergonomically into political certitude. An individual, through forced applicability of well-intentioned political ends, operates as means to the reproduction of norms. Trending language favors “bodies” over “people,” abstracting those “bodies” whose corporeality would be politically constituted: a body that fits into, a body that works. You … abridged.”
— Samuel Kenswil
