12/11/2020 - 01/24/2021
Surface Tension was a group exhibition with Ashley Gillanders, Rosemary Holliday Hall, SaraNoa Mark, Galen-Odell Smedley, and myself at Heaven Gallery. I exhibited another iteration of Acknowledgments, this time focusing on the US’s impact on the land, native species, and lifeways of Indigenous peoples, highlighting the contradictions inherent in American symbols and policies. I developed the sound piece loophole by combining the original and covered versions of the song “Fly Like an Eagle.” This layering creates a confusing dissonance that displaces the original author, symbolizing how historical and intergenerational trauma can present as dissociation or fragmentation in the body and mind, reflecting a theme of historical recurrence. The work additionally includes a collective candle pour, "For once they intuited that the human will was long intent on capture, they all conspired to rest their Truth everywhere" - M. Jacqui Alexander, referencing Lynda Benglis’s “pour” works, but instead transforming individual gestures into a collective act of remembrance and healing. It also features Phoenix–a wall installation with a spotlight and a temporary tattoo, and Acknowledgments 2020–a digital webpage containing resource links embedded within the contextual timeline.