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 video installation exploring the connections between land and body conditions and 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 in the film was created in collaboration with Joelle Mercedes, furthering these themes with recordings of underground motors, water, passing cars in nature, and distorted machinery sounds, symbolizing industrial and human elements in an abstracted landscape. Moments of liberation emerge through repetition and songs that feature colonial subjects’ voices, which become 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. The accessible/adaptive bench was created and responded to by me and participants in the workshop titled “Self-Design with Others” at JMKAC. These works offer ways to intervene, adapt, and transform existing forms into responsive sites for contemplation, learning, and healing, sharing possibilities beyond capitalist systems that prioritize profit over people. When exhibited together, these works 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.