ART

None of the images or text below may be reproduced or reprinted without my permission.

ABORTION PIÑATA, 2024

This performance/installation series is inspired by the late artist, photographer, and director Agnès Varda, who once said: “I tried to be a joyful feminist, but I was very angry.” Joy and rage are the two emotions I associate with abortion — the rage of oppression, the joy of solidarity and the potential for full autonomy — and they are also the two emotions I associate with the piñata tradition — the joy of a colorful object, of celebration and community, and the violence of breaking it apart, the feeling of rage, no matter how small, that accompanies any act of destruction. Piñatas are most often found at children’s parties. I engage in the childlike behavior of beating a piñata and I wonder: am I more human to you now? When you think of me as a child instead of a woman?

Abortion Piñata: For Agnès, is up for auction with The Brigid Alliance from April 17 - May 15, 2024.

SUPREME O, 2022-2023

As both a writer and visual artist, I work almost exclusively in paper and text. Currently I focus on large scale erasure poems in which I seek to edit public documents that trouble me in some way. My process: I enlarge the existing document in its entirety and transfer it to canvas or wood board, and then I erase words and sentences until the remaining text, a new poem, has become something that no longer disturbs me. This piece, SUPREME O, began as the 2022 leaked Supreme Court draft that overturned Roe (about 65 pages + footnotes). My erasure version is a poem/manifesto for a new, imagined "religion" that worships abortion and female autonomy. The content is meant to convey rage for what has been and what still is (and joy for what could be) while the structure is inspired by various art movement manifestos. The complete art piece is three parts: the erasure poem itself, the manifesto text typed out and framed beside it, and a bowl of printed copies of select manifesto sentences or phrases for viewers to take, so that we can each carry a piece of the document with us.

In March 2023, at the Bombay Beach Biennale, I launched the art piece in a performance called The Inaugural Mass of the Church of Potential Life. The photos of this performance were taken by my friend Matt Ellis. This performance received national coverage in Insider.

In summer 2023, the piece was on view in Glendale, California at The Brand Library, for their annual Works on Paper exhibition.

The MISSING series, 2020

As a writer and an artist, I’m interested in the visual appearance of words on a page or a canvas — not only what they say, but how they’re arranged. My “Missing” series is a collection of erasure poems dedicated to specific women (like Ana Mendieta, Breonna Taylor, and Amy Bradley) who are currently missing from global conversations, communities, and/or historical texts either because they have literally gone missing, or because they died of unnatural and tragic causes. My source materials include newspaper and magazine articles, written laws, phone call transcripts, and any other documents where the woman is theoretically the subject and yet appears in the document more as an object.

The erasure poems allow me to write the women back into these documents by erasing any irrelevant, incorrect, offensive, or otherwise unnecessary information so that the women can be centered in the conversation.

One of these pieces was on view with Woman Made Gallery in their What Are You Voting For? exhibition in October 2020.