I Promise I Won’t Scream
A participatory sound exhibition in two interconnected locations.
“I promise I won’t scream.” It was the first time I had heard this well-worn mantra out loud. Spoken by my three-year-old niece, she was promising to be good so that I would take her with me to the market. My whole body recognized the beginning of her new life-long ritual, I too measured my goodness by how well I could stuff down and tie off my screams. It’s been five years and she no longer says it out loud. She just contorts her mouth in agony, forcing any sound to stay in her throat. In a few years, she will learn to privatize her ritual in a bathroom or closet.
As I asked woman after woman about her own rituals of pressurized expirations, I couldn't figure out how to name what so many of us held in our bodies, concentrated into something unrecognizable
the Wants, tiny, muted, slowly buried inside the Don’t Wants
I struggled to name them. I struggled to speak about them, to write about them here. Instead, I wrote down steps to release the pressure when I was failing to be good, tiny, muted, and slowly buried.
I started learning about the effect of sound wave vibration on wood and how you could theoretically play back any exposed wood in a building and hear every sound ever made inside it. I learned that sound affects our cells in a similar way. What would I hear if I played back all those silent screams I had muffled against the soft tissues of my insides? What sounds had gone into making and marking the structure of my cells?
These are the sounds of my body and her own making.
The Digital Companion
A participatory performance with digital artifacts as documentation.
Displayed online and in a gallery setting, this looped 4 channel video which served as both an invitation and exhibition of digital artifacts inspired by the interpersonal dynamics between The Digital Companion and participants. Over 6 weeks, anyone could request The Digital Companion for any activity, time and digital medium. Each week the video was updated with new material created as documentation of that week's companionship experiences. Participants could come back and view videos that were created about their time with The Digital Companion.
My Sister
A four day performance, 37ft embroidered quilt, & video.
My sister is an extremely complicated part of my life. She is the person who knows me the truest and also the least. In my 30s, I shared a recurring nightmare with her, and to my surprise, she told me it wasn't a nightmare but had actually happened to us. We began comparing stories of our childhood, an act we had never thought to initiate, taking for granted that we must have remembered our lives the same. Some of our memories were so different that it felt like we were born into families that had never met, while other times, we shared identical stories that seemed rehearsed. Sister is the strongest identity I have, and I began to wonder how much of it I had made up.
This work investigates cognitive dissonance and the implications of memory on identity. It poses the question: If our memories are fallible and influenced by the roles we live into, what does it mean that our identities are formed based on individual and collective memory?
Over the course of four days, I sat in a gallery space and typed out every memory I could think of that involved my sister and me, from childhood to adulthood. A screen facing outward displayed my typing in real time, and I did not allow myself to edit. The memories were continuously printed and displayed on a wall for the audience to read at their leisure. At 6 pm every evening, I would leave, and my sister would come in, using a green pen to write her version of each memory in the margins of mine. Our conflicting (and sometimes unrealistically identical) memories were displayed for viewers to read. When writing or editing, we wore uniforms that resembled the jackets our mother made us wear when we were young.
For a later museum installation, the paper memories created during the four-day performance were reformed into a continuous 37ft quilt, embroidered with a merged memory (we fell in love with the same boy a decade apart), using white-work techniques. The quilt was accompanied by a four-part video that investigated different aspects of cognitive dissonance and the measures we take to maintain our identity over reality.
Pillow Jerk.
Often I find myself making an observation without realizing that I am speaking something out loud that was meant to be hidden. In an effort to neutralize their discomfort, people sometimes say things to me that I endearingly call “throw pillow quotes” - those objects that have no other purpose than to create a decorative and perceived comfort. Sometimes, I arrange these throw pillow quotes in a circle and imagine that they are jerking each other off.
If You’re Not Real
There is a marriage quilt that can be identified by the patterns and colors that are specific to certain families and regions. Each night before bed my parents would bow their heads with mine and we would pray for my future husband, for some five year old boy, somewhere out there, dealing with the same five year old problems as me. I was waiting for him my whole life. This best friend, promised over and over. The one who would break the curse handed down to me through my mother. The marriage quilt could redeem our family, it could cover the sin of being me.
One day I found myself in covenant with the marriage quilt.
My chest expanded and pressed down. Suffocating inside my liberation.