One Week Before Spring
2021
The photographs used as reference for these prints occurred from March 7 to March 14, 2021, nearly one week before the 2021 Spring Solstice. Each of these etchings were produced in an edition of 5 and served as the foundation for the series of lithographic works in One Week in Spring.
30% of all sales from these prints go directly to KC Tenants, an organization fighting for Kansas City people’s ability to have safe, accessible, and affordable homes.
Having a Flower With You
2021
Having A Flower With You, 2021, screenprint on fabric, 22” x 22”
Having a Flower With You is a screenprint on fabric, produced for the Queer Ecology Hanky Project’s 2021 summer exhibition at the Women’s Studio Workshop. The print signaled a shift in my work, exploring the fragments of life during the Covid-19 pandemic. I was influenced by adrienne maree brown’s 2018 book Emergent Strategy, particularly with the influence of dandelions, growth, and distant gestures of love from friends. This print looks at the queer reciprocity from Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke With You,” envisioned here as “having a flower with you.” Additionally, as part of the Queer Ecology Hanky Project, I was inspired by the early 70s gay hanky code wherein gay men would signal to one another sexual desires and the roles they would play in those activities. In early iterations of the code, light blue indicated a desire for oral sex.
In this work, I am signaling my own desire to consume change, love, reciprocity, and transformation.
One Week in Spring
2021This work is available through Uprise Art NYC.
The phrase “one week in spring” was a signifier of a specific coincidence from 2018. While looking back at my archive of photographs documenting mine and my partner’s disheveled bed in the morning, I noticed a consistent set of photographs spanning one full week at the onset of the spring solstice. I was drawn to this idea of change and growth associated with the season. My practice slowly began to shift during this time to be about learning and a patient production, focusing on the space and context of gathering, of quiet, of intimacy.
During the Covid-19 pandemic however, the simultaneity of stillness and transformation occurring in everyday life brought a natural disruption to established routines. This new work was produced under my own tense framework of urgency that avoided overthinking—these prints are purely about play and curiosity. This imagery draws upon nature and the biological systems modeling change, the concept of emergence, and the added coincidence that the start of the 2020 pandemic lockdown also happened before a spring solstice. I continue my investigations on intimacy, but here I look more at grander gestures and arrangements as a means of navigating and discovering possibilities.