With, Holding
2024
Performance, installation, sound, projection, bankers boxes, archival family documents, MDF board, handmade sugarcane paper
With, Holding is a performance work blending video, sound, and installation to explore themes of opacity, intergenerational/diasporic relationships to labor, visibility, fixity, power, control, and the space between sense and the documented.
Performed at the Anderson Gallery in Spring 2024 in the VCUArts MFA Thesis Exhibition.
In this video, you see me moving through a 16x19ft re-creation of my
dad's 1992 w-2 tax grid which I use as a stage. Throughout the
performance, a video is projected and split by pieces of fabric which
function something like a curtain, a scrim, or a screen, mediating and
blocking my image to the audience members. I re-perform my mom and dad's
labor of home-making: my mother doing laundry and my dad lifting cargo
at the airport. I remix and edit an interview I took with my father
about all of the jobs he's ever worked in his life. At the end of the
performance I "break the grid" and exit.