MFA Thesis Exhibition + Thesis Performance, SME Gallery, 2024

Exhibition photos by wren gardner, performance photos by Adrian-Dre Diaz

Video documentation (edit to come) by Jamil Baldwin and Chanell Stone

Title inspired by Kai Cheng Thom’s I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World, and K Jacobson showing me Dan Reeder’s Born A Worm

With gracious support from Russell Foundation Grant

Special thank yous to Nataly Rojo, Emily Yang, Gin To for performance support.


This exhibition reflects on the suicidal undertones of endurance performance art. On one end of the gallery shows a performance where I spent a night in a bulldozer, on the other end, a performance where I sat on the margins of an active highway. In the center of the exhibition, a naturally patina-ed car grounds the exhibition with its machinic presence and metallic age. It serves as a reflective body that quietly signals to the death drive, contact with heavy machinery, and passage of time that the two video projections sandwiching it contain. 

In the performance, I took a sleeping pill and fell asleep in the car hugging a rock. I left the audience a video where I monologued instructions to strip the car of all objects, replace them with hand-tie buoquets of highway wildflowers, and to finally collectively wake me up softly.

Performance

Exhibition View