Performance staged with steel handmade scaffolding, curved PVC pipe sculpture, furniture springs, concrete, cement, glass micro-beads, water, rebar, drill, clamps, wood, drywall molding, mask, push-up bra knee pads, "Babe with the power" top, rubber gloves with lace lining, Topman boxers, mold release
12' x 20' x 10' of space
With an old push-up bra as knee pads, I performed Building an Arch twice, to cast the front and back of a half arch, imprinted with curved PVC pipe. While storytelling, I carried out the labor of mixing and pouring concrete over an arched PVC pipe, in a mold box made of curved crown molding. The stories I told were relating to formed beliefs around gender and agency in my life. These stories had stifling quotes depicting mentalities of my childhood and the mentalities of male family members, teachers, and adult sexual predators of my teenage years. I also talk about my little cousins, who have looked up to me since I was their age. I hope to manifest a future for them free of toxic self-beliefs by exposing the faulty foundations of how we are raised and mirroring back it’s imprint. Violence has a range of effects, from physical to the earliest projected beliefs that I am inherently incapable. Building an Arch is creating a structure with an exposed process and intention as well. I think of this performance the way I think of performing music, how I cannot escape coming from a vulnerable place in order to get the necessary sound from my mouth, and how it takes enduring the performance to get a stronger voice. The performance ends with an open discussion for the audience to share stories.
Through appropriated languages of labor, construction, and architecture, I aim to understand passed down traditions of belief and our potential to control the sensation of individual spirituality.
With the Arch, I conflate the language of religious visuals through objects and performances with the language of DIY/laborious construction practices. I think of this as playing with labor and creation as spiritual practices. This practice spiritually focuses on honing the power in what we have decided to believe. Considering the intensity to how deeply spiritual people can feel that immaterial something, my practice commits to performing conscious gestures for beliefs that have been imposed through family and culture. Harmful beliefs, that shape the way I have become, are peeled off and reimagined through a physical practice. Objects both represent and become a part of spiritual self-manufacturing.
Although spirit can only be measured by one experiencing it, commonalities in literature, history and culture that inspire divine interaction allude to the existence of something I aim to find: universal, egalitarian congregation of everything. Through repetitious, conscious gestures, spirituality is commemorated in daily life, as a performance for the things outside of what we can know for fact.