09/02 - 11/09/2025
Group exhibition featuring Chloe P. Crawford, Nat Decker, Jeff Kasper, Carly Mandel, Jeffrey Meris, Libby Paloma, and myself at Tufts University examines the radical questioning of Johanna Hedva’s seminal text, “Sick Woman Theory”, asking: “How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” Commissioned by Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC), If the earth is flesh, everything remains, is a site-specific multimedia installation exploring the connections between land and body conditions. The video work represents complex trauma responses, grief, and resilience in the sovereign lands of the Taíno people in Boríken, or what is now called Puerto Rico. The sound was created in collaboration with Joelle Mercedes, furthering these themes of embodiment and rupture with recordings of underground motors, water, walking, passing cars, and distorted machinery sounds, symbolizing the industrial, nature, and the human; elements in an abstracted landscape. Moments of liberation emerge through repetition, signaling cyclical time, and with songs that feature colonial subjects’ voices–mantras to break spells. In front of the video work is a collapsible sculpture, open Source (bench), that critiques industrialization and hostile architecture, reframing minimalist and modernist designs to consider our own bodily needs. Participants responded to the accessible/adaptive bench during a collaborative workshop called “Self-Design with Others” led by me and Chloe P. Crawford at JMKAC. These works offer ways to intervene, adapt, and transform existing forms into responsive sites for contemplation and healing, sharing possibilities beyond capitalist systems that prioritize profit over people. When exhibited together, they offer a space of rest, reflection, and reimagination, and a potential grounding amid entangled social conditions, histories, and embodied landscapes. They provide a lens into the internal protest of the land and body caused by various traumas, and the collective protest we can engage in by working together to reimagine new structures of support.