12/11/2020 - 01/24/2021
Surface Tension was a group exhibition with Ashley Gillanders, Rosemary Holliday Hall, SaraNoa Mark, Galen-Odell Smedley, and myself at Heaven Gallery. I exhibited another iteration of Acknowledgments, this time raising awareness about the US conquests and extractivists' impact on the land and native species while also highlighting the contradictions inherent in American symbols and policies. Using both the original and covered versions of the song Fly Like an Eagle to explore themes of historical recurrence, I layered all the covers, merging them into a confusing dissonance that dislocates the original author, much like how historical and intergenerational trauma can manifest as dissociation or fragmentation in the body and mind. The work incorporates a collective candle pour, "For once they intuited that the human will was long intent on capture, they all conspired to rest their Truth everywhere" - M. Jacqui Alexander. Referencing Lynda Benglis’s “pour” works, I transformed her individual gestures into a collective act of healing. I also exhibited a wall installation featuring a spotlight and a temporary tattoo, Phoenix, and a digital webpage containing resource links embedded within the contextual timeline, Acknowledgments