Exoskeleton (2023)

BODY / MEMORY

Exoskeleton is an installation and performance led by the desire to map the ephemeral nature of embodiment and loss through found materials, domestic rhythms, and nestled gestures. To live is to leave traces.

Over the course of the three-month exhibition, Get Together, at Reyes Finn Gallery in Detroit, I would leave a ‘trace,’ made of silicon, rocks, shells, sticks, wax, or other found materials. Each trace was placed to create a trail across the gallery, from the front door to the back door. The traces were small sculptures that sometimes went unnoticed, as visitors accidentally stepped on a few and shattered or smushed them with their shoes. The trail led to the side yard of the gallery where it ended in a performance involved all the traces accumulated and sewn to a garment, worn on my body, then cut apart to give each audience member a trace. The performance was a dance, an incantation, and a way to consider the temporal frameworks, warps, and hallucinations that comprise memory, experience, and desire. The performance also included waving sticks, slapping my thighs with cement pavers, rolling up in 50 feet of mylar, and being sprayed by a garden hose.