this is the only thing we've got

six-channel video installation

University of Arizona Museum of Art

Tucson, Arizona

2021

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This installation is dedicated to love, and examines the internalized values that mediate our familial, platonic, and romantic bonds. Via performances-for-video, I deal explicitly with the physical labor involved in communicating love through cooperation and curiosity, and in creating new muscle memories in our hearts. The recorded actions show and imagine what devotional care is and could be–embodied explorations of vulnerability, interdependence, sacrifice, endurance, risk, and trust, looping over themselves every day that we wake up and choose it. Audio braids itself into a mimcry of layered experience. Repetition in action and sound, and as editing device, allows for both comfort and tedium.

Throughout this ongoing collection I seek to dissolve the barrier between knowing something and feeling it; I’m curious as to how aligning actions with words might begin to repair the disconnect often found there. From this perspective, I ask for an investment and faith on the part of the viewer that gestures toward the commitment and conviction required to build love. I hope for collective participation in being afraid and also brave, in jumping and falling, in trying over and over and over again. It is my understanding that the drive to try anyway–to attempt to grow, hope, and thrive together in community in the face of so many unknowns and so little control–is our species’ collective insanity and communal tenderness, and the only thing lighting our way into an uncertain future.