* We witness the world increasingly through brief glimpses of social media. My work organizes a stream of what I consider “interventions” in both physical and digital spaces as I have presented them on my social media feeds. I create by considering the context of my work and how it will be presented. Thus, all of the work shown in Dies Irae were pieces I documented for social media or made specifically for that platform. The video is both a documentation of each intervention and a work of art itself. Dies Irae includes sculptural-installation, drawing and performance art, digital and internet art, as well as hybrids of these media. This title is a latin chant that translates to Day of Wrath which blends atmospheric, meditative music with a foreboding message. The floor sculpture also contains elements of each type of media, either in subject matter or material, and plays the chant on a loop.
[addendum] Dies Irae is a Catholic tradition so I blended my upbringing with my experience of learning Shinto practice organically through material and experiential awareness and repetition.
Eric Garner was executed by police for selling cigarettes; Alton Sterling was executed by police for selling CDs; Stephon Clark was executed by police for holding his cellphone (here my own, playing Dies Irae); Trayvon Martin was executed by police for having a pack of skittles in his hoodie pouch.
This multimedia work explores “interventions” and meditations on landscapes and social issues.
Excerpt from my thesis paper:
The construction ‘No Justice, No Peace,’ is described by linguist Ben Zimmer, “even when a cause and effect is stated ("No peace because of no justice") … this is not a call to arms to disrupt ‘the peace’ but rather an introspective reflection on how ‘peace within our hearts and within our communities’ has been disrupted. He quotes University of Pennsylvania Chaplain Charles Howard statement that “To me the phrase ‘No Justice, No Peace’ is not so much a threat as much as it is a cry of the heart. It is not simply a call to protest, but also a naming of the powers and what those powers have done.”
The work weaves interventions I undertook throughout a school year. It isn’t just focused on racial justice but is intersectional insofar as gun violence in schools, transmisic and transphobic violence domestically and in public, and state violence against Black folks, particularly women (Black women of transgender experience) come from a root cause of systemic racism and poor mental health support for potential “lone wolf” (white) shooters.
After Carolee Schneemann