2021
your poison is our medicine is a research-poetics–text-based work (wall label) that unfolds through a series of small wall sculptures (image transfers on pistachio shells), sound pieces, and a takeaway diagram. The work appropriates and intervenes in museum didactics and display (referencing the Field Museum’s botanical collections) to reframe our relationship to poisonous plants (specifically the Anacardiaceae family, including poison ivy and pistachio) and current environmental crises (such as overconsumption, water scarcity, and climate change). It is a proposition to deepen our awareness of the structures that create ecocide (colonialism and global capitalist economies) and mobilize actions towards transformative change.
Throughout the wall label text, I mix prose poetry with gathered research and redactions of taxonomic writings on the poison ivy and pistachio plants. The footnotes serve as a site of potentiality, engaging source material, personal narratives, and decolonial, environmental, and social activist strategies. In the installation, citations vibrate off the page and are reflected in images transferred onto the insides of pistachio shells, alongside sound works that punctuate the silence ([11] dream record, [13] artist’s song/prayer, [24] pistachio shell snaps, and [26] a clip of Nina Simone covering George Harrison’s “Isn’t it a Pity”). These multisensory forms of translation broaden research into felt sense and realign the viewer with a kincentric (to use Enrique Salmón’s term) understanding of being in, of, and with the living world.