Locust_Projects_2021_Exhibition_Proposal

Last crawled date: 11 months, 3 weeks ago

“It’s Hard to be Soft” I am proposing an exhibition that includes a performance and interactive installation at Locust Projects. The installation will fill the Project Room with pillows suspended from chains at gently ascending heights, from floor to ceiling. (Ideally, there will also be an audio recording on a playback loop, from the production.) In the spirit of experimentation, the ‘performance’ is intended to be a collaborative effort between myself as an artist and art-handler, and the viewers. With the aim of this cooperation being a newfound appreciation for the effort behind installing artwork, and the opportunity to personally facilitate an understanding of identities outside the gender binary. In the same way that (unexpectedly) helping build an artwork disrupts the ways we are used to viewing art, it also encourages us to ask, what else goes unseen? Beginning the day of the exhibition, I will invite viewers to assist me in attaching pillows to the chains, I will then suspend from the support beams running lengthwise through the Project Room. Using simple hardware like carabiners and eye hooks, we will make short work of the install, but as a guide I will encourage quiet-speaking and general conversation. Things I am interested in investigating with this project are; my interaction with a community I have never before worked in, how will this audience shape the final outcome of the installation? What does working as a gender-queer individual with others in Miami mean? Will highlighting my experience in gender, sexuality, and faith (in this conceptual way) resonate with the participants at Locust Projects? Can we collaborate successfully to create something soft, beautiful, but ultimately a captivating memorial to the internal, softer sides of ourselves? While an attempt at celebration of my own identity, this work also functions an invitation to a feeling of ownership of the traumas many queer bodies have experienced. A forest of pillows is a symbol of sleepless nights, and tears wasted on pain, insecurities, and fear surrounding an identity existing outside the binary. But together we build this monument to transcend, creating something secure through soft moments and materials. Later, viewers can lay, rest, swing the pillows, relax, wander, chat, explore, and continue cultivating the feeling of ascension together. (While I understand the inherent safety issues of live installations, and a ladder in a space open to the public, I am interested in how this work can change, or morph to suit Locust Projects concerns and allow for greater accessibility. This installation does not take current COVID-19 precautions into consideration at this time, but I am also interested in considering how this could be accomplished.)