Text Work (2016)
Written on residency with SFMOMA's Open Space blog.
This piece presents a re-interpretation of the U.S. national anthem, "The Star Spangled Banner."
Text Work (2016)
Written on residency with SFMOMA's Open Space blog.
This piece re-imagines and re-writes Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" by recasting Socrates and Glaucon with Lilith and Eve, the first two women according to Hebraic literature. It explores what we have inherited from this key text in the tradition of classical Western thought and presents an alternative philosophical past and legacy.
(2016) Text Work
Written on residency with SFMOMA's Open Space blog.
This piece consists of "poems" that are "translations" made from transcripts of voicemails left by my mother who speaks English as a Second Language.
(2014) Text Work in Spanish and English
For the book of the same name, I created a linguistic and semiotic translation of a lecture written by the Mexican modern architect Enrique del Moral. Using research and images presented in footnotes throughout the lecture, the work creates an active form of engaging with the words and ideas of del Moral.
Published by Guayaba Press and Archivo in Mexico City. Edited by Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio and Kristina Lee Podesva.
(2012) Text Work
This project was commissioned for an online exhibition entitled Inverse Operating Manual, curated by Dena Beard, for The Present Group. It was designed to accompany an earlier web work This is a Vehicle. The project appeared in the form of a downloadable PDF that features an excerpt from Karl Marx’s Estranged Labour (1844) alongside abstract volumetric shapes that stand in for capitalist goods and services. Artists included in this exhibition were Anthony Discenza, the Center for Tactical Magic, David Horvitz, Packard Jennings, Anna Lundh, Elizabeth Sims, and me.
Ideas for the project started taking shape while in residence at Real Time and Space in Oakland.
To see the full PDF, please email a request.
(2012-ongoing) Text Work
This piece is the third in a series dedicated to the Haitian Revolution. Begun in 2011, the series is a personal and ongoing commitment to create a work engaging with the revolution, its history, legacy, and people through artistic experiments and investigations. Dramatis Personae... assembles the cast of characters involved in the revolution according to C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins and Lauren Dubois’ Avengers of the New World. Part historical homage, fictionalized departure, and poetic exercise, the work occasions a revitalization of the period and its participants.
To see the full PDF, please email a request.
(2012) Text Work
This work takes as its subject the form and feeling of “haunting” that Enlightenment thought has left to us as "inheritance". For us, this thought exists as a perpetual ghost. The piece engages Enlightenment innovations such as the Cartesian plane and Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedie in a treatment that renders these legacies as strange and spectral.
Ideas for the project started taking shape while I was an artist in residence at Real Time and Space in Oakland.
To see the full PDF, please email a request.
(2011) Published Art Work
For the book Waking Up from the Nightmare of Participation, edited by Markus Miessen and Nina Valerie Kolowratnik and published by Expodium, I contributed a text and a series of stills from my video installation Structure of Relief (shown in the image).