this is the only thing we've got

six-channel video installation

University of Arizona Museum of Art

Tucson, Arizona

2021

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this is the only thing we’ve got is a suite of videos about what it means to dedicate yourself to love, and to the constant examination of the internalized values that mediate the familial, platonic, and romantic bonds that shape our lives. In both performance and video, I deal explicitly with the physical labor involved in communicating love through cooperation and curiosity, and in creating new muscle memories in our hearts. The recorded actions show and imagine what devotional care is and can be–embodied explorations of vulnerability, interdependence, sacrifice, endurance, risk, and trust, looping over themselves every day that we wake up and choose it. Repetition in action and as a device creates both comfort and tedium.

Throughout this ongoing collection I seek to dissolve the barrier between knowing something and feeling it. I’m curious as to how aligning actions with words might begin to repair the disconnect often found there, and build resilience in my own queer future and in our collective heart. From this perspective, I ask for an investment and faith on the part of the viewer that gestures toward the commitment and conviction required to build love; altruism unseats austerity, abundance overthrows scarcity. It is my understanding that the drive to try anyway–to attempt to grow, hope, and thrive together in community in the face of so many unknowns and so little control–is our species’ collective insanity and communal tenderness, and the only thing lighting our way into an uncertain future.