MFA Thesis Exhibition
"between / no longer / and / not yet"
p.e.r.v.e.r.t.e.d, r.e.v.o.l.t.i.n.g, m.e.a.n.d.e.r.i.n.g, g.e.s.t.a.t.i.o.n.s
Presented June 2024, at Anna Leon-Owens Gallery, NSCAD University, Kjipuktuk/Halifax, N.S.
This thesis exhibition, established as a temporary, two-week, site-specific space of critique, interrogates the porous boundaries of subjectivity by mobilizing the radical, non-linear trajectories of 'queer thingness.' Rather than treating the material world—archives, physical spaces, and everyday matter—as static backdrops, this work activates them as dynamic agents that simultaneously construct and are destabilized by non-normative desires. By tracing how these objects refuse stable taxonomy and acquire queer orientations, the exhibition disrupts entrenched heteronormative paradigms, positioning material mutability as a vital site of queer survival.
I admit to taking advantage of the art institute, desiring and enjoying this ambiguous, unique existence that creates spaces for questioning and wondering while resisting the reductionist and strategic essentialism that so often frames artists and our work. I ground my contribution to artistic thought in an act of epistemic disobedience, intentionally bypassing know-ledge practices built upon teleological master narratives and Western rationalist illusions of conquest and control. By dismantling rigid Cartesian dualisms—specifically the false dichotomies of the pure versus the artificial, and the natural versus the unnatural—I refuse the structural alienation that seeks to divorce rigorous epistemological work from the emancipatory power of play, ontological experimentation, and curiosity.
Rather than operating as a site of passive representation, this work activ-ated the classroom, studio, and gallery space to surface relational top-ologies for multispecies encounters and a deep, systemic sense of belong-ing. The work directly grapples with the chronic friction, systemic anxiety, and historical conflicts generated within a White, patriarchal, neoliberal monoculture; yet, it remained fiercely propelled by the conviction that, amid the complex dialectics of pleasure and trauma, queer transgressive thought and bodies actively construct an enduring, vital, and erotic dynamism that ruptures an other-wise hostile, extractive environment. Ultimately, this text and the concomitant exhibition operationalize the dense, multifaceted archives of queer survival and the stubborn, gen-erative resilience embedded within them.
Furthermore, this live intervention operates with an acute awareness of its own parameters, recognizing that queer research is a relatively nascent field of inquiry and that this thesis work is ultimately a provisional frag-ment in a complex, continuous process of meaning-making. Consequently, the project resists the impulse toward linear or exhaustive conclusions, choosing instead to navigate a dual methodology; therefore, at times, the work is rooted in research endeavours, seeking to substantiate specific lines of inquiry, while at others, it embodies the exploratory essence central to queer scholarship, ultimately proposing additional questions rather than definitive answers. By structuralizing this perpetual open-endedness, the thesis positions its own gaps and provisional statements not as scholarly failures, but as generative, vital spaces where future pedagogical and artistic dialogues can continually take root.
The historical trajectory of art demonstrates a consistent pursuit of liber-ation and emancipation, functioning as a vital response to the world’s complex, opaque nature. The artist’s endeavour manifests through creative acts of making—operating as an expression of agency and self-activism while fostering an expanded awareness of their entanglement with sur-rounding environments. The mutual development of this thesis and my personal trajectory remained deeply inflected by this absolute material interconnectedness, which continuously catalyzed intimate, recursive pro-cesses of unlearning colonial habits of possession, re-learning relational ways of being, and queering the very boundaries of the creative act. These iterative shifts cultivated a heightened sensitivity to the fragility, intimacy, and desire permeating my life and work; recognizing the interplay of these elements, with the theme of "care" as their structural leitmotif, prompted an exploration of creative approaches that embrace bodily and artistic vitality more intimately, which ultimately opened new avenues to live and work in a manner that celebrates difference while actively bridging the divide between theory and praxis.
To achieve this intent, the project deployed an embodied, iterative, and circular research-creation methodology, designed to ensure the resulting body of work operates as an active, living document. This non-linear loop structurally destabilizes traditional hierarchies of knowledge production: the studio-based making directly informs the theoretical framework, which inflects the textual analysis, which, in turn, systematically reinforms the parameters of both the research and material creation. By resisting a teleological, straight-line progression from theory to application, this re-cursive methodological loop actively mirrors the erratic, non-linear traj-ectories of queer thingness itself. The generative friction between hand, archive, and text ensures that the creative process mimics its conceptual inquiry. Consequently, the fluid entanglements between disparate, every-day research modalities—reading, writing, walking, wandering, collecting, material experimentation, critical examination, dialogue, discussion, and radical imagining—were not merely preparatory acts, but rather struct-urally intrinsic to the final material and conceptual architecture of the project. Rather than observing material mutability from a 'safe' academic distance, this symbiotic practice-led approach embeds the researcher in an intimate participation—collapsing the binary between the writing subject and the queer object, and cementing the studio / workspace as a vital site of survival, resistance, and unstable taxonomy.
Both artists and writers grapple with bewilderment driven by unanswered questions. I mention this as a pertinent framework for discussing method-ology. The process involves identifying and revisiting these questions daily (akin to locating one’s glasses or medication) and diligently working through them. This work may manifest through the manipulation of lang- uage or materials, engendering a state of contemplation that, in my ex- perience, is entirely driven by creative energy. Through ongoing practice, one learns to allow the central questions to guide and shape the work—leading to a state of openness—while still grappling with them.
This iterative trajectory is fundamentally a laborious one, characterized by intense psychosomatic exertion, rigorous intellectual and libidinal stimu-lation, and a profound existential reckoning that ultimately culminates in a complex, generative blend of joyful sorrow and raw affective passion. Within this mode of creation, a process of gradual material and conceptual accum-ulation occurs—an architecture of comprehension—wherein the assimil-ation of new insights develops sequentially, mimicking the cumulative logic of geometric proofs and cascading corollaries. Throughout this develop-ment, the practice consistently balances that which is immediately or ostensibly accessible against an underlying field of tactile connection and somatic dexterity. This friction foregrounds singular expressive offerings that cannot be flattened or mediated by language, operating instead with-in the vital, autonomous register of tacit, implicit, and thoroughly non-lin-guistic knowing.
An amalgamation of undervalued, overlooked, salvaged, and discarded objects—interlaced with meticulously crafted materials, painterly sub-strates, and indexical images—coalesces to generate a hybrid visual lan-guage, or poiesis, that embodies what Alfred North Whitehead charact-erizes as an ontological mode of 'letting-be' (Whitehead, Poiesis and Art-Making: A Way of Letting-Be, 2003). Rather than forcing these disparate elements into a top-down, authoritarian structure, this materialist poiesis allows the intrinsic agency of the objects to articulate themselves, intent-ionally emphasizing the recovery of the forgotten, the obscured, and the systematically ignored. Crucially, this practice expands beyond mere histor-ical retrieval to encompass the unmanifested: that which remains stub-bornly undiscovered or is yet to be born into form. By operationalizing this hybrid vocabulary, the work destabilizes institutional narratives to inter-rogate both the ethics and the mechanics of storytelling. It desires entirely novel, non-linear conceptions of the 'historical'—transforming the static archive into a dynamic, relational threshold that actively loops the no-longer of ancestral memory into the not-yet of speculative futures.
"Stasis Station"
Materials: wooden box with lid, brass coated hinges & chain,
a variety of hand-burnished wood pieces and stones, wood shavings, a hand carved wooden object, a bundle of paper-wrapped wooden pieces (coated with matte medium tied together with twine), and a borrowed cushion.
By enacting a volatile friction between material destruction and systemic endurance, the recovered and recovering states of these materials & mat-erial substrates inject critical nuance into the central, recurring question animating this research-creation practice: What structurally differentiates art, heritage, and debris? This deliberate reliance on unconventional, sal-vaged media—such as driftwood, beach-cast wreckage, and anthropogenic detritus—is grounded in the conviction that these discarded materials fun-ction as vibrant, non-human archives, physically indexing historical traces that can unearth suppressed or forgotten narratives. These items—existing precariously between being already named and becoming newly name-able—bear latent associations with broader, institutional constructs of cult-ural inheritance. By weaponizing this instability, the assemblages actively disrupt top-down, state-sanctioned preservation paradigms to catalyze radical new dialogues surrounding the politics of heritage-making. This materialist critique prompts a more nuanced, diverse interrogation of what is currently [and often fiercely] preserved for future generations and / or deliberately relinquished to the generative forces of entropy, decay, and ecological integration.
As such, this thesis considers the profound concept of irreconcilability and its positioning as an epistemological threshold wherein specific material and cultural phenomena structurally resist totalized explanation or lin-guistic articulation. Rather than viewing this illegibility as a passive deficit, the framework encounters a volatile dynamic between the scholarly drive for semantic clarity and the intrinsic boundaries of human comprehension. The hyper-relational, multifaceted dimensions of these phenomena gener-ate a productive anxiety and an acute urgency when translating their core affects, often manifesting as a deliberately fragmented, non-linear, and in-complete aesthetic representation. Consequently, while the research was deeply motivated to map these complex ecologies, certain critical vectors remained elusively un-translatable or strategically left un-narrated. This practice of intentional omission shifts the focus away from the authoritative disclosure previously mentioned, raising vital questions regarding the political and generative power of these deliberate silences and their latent capacity for non-linguistic, affective communication.
"It Was Apparent That The Stone Was Hard"
Materials: Wooden support structure, stainless steel
screws, wood glue, Spray-foam insulation, sand,
a stone, wood stain, and oil paints.
The material intervention titled "It was apparent that the stone was hard," for example, prioritizes a tactile semiotics that intentionally exceeds the parameters of human language, prompting the viewer to 'read' the work through an imagined, bodily engagement. While acknowledging that interpretation remains a deeply subjective, situated phenomenon, the work explicitly relies on a lack of linguistic signifiers. In the absence of an authorial text or image, the raw, unmediated presence of the materials becomes the primary conductor of meaning as the viewer is confronted with a volatile, if not paradoxical, and thoroughly Aokian ‘between’ space.
This methodology operates here as a non-traditional landscape painting to physically index the littoral topography of the seashore while deliberately radiating a sense of acute ecological unease. Eschewing the detached gaze of classical plein-air painting, the project utilizes a raw, wooden support framework coated in expansive polyurethane insulation foam, which was placed directly on a highly textured sand formation on Lower East Chezzet-cook beach, Nova Scotia. Executed under strict temporal and environ-mental constraints—calculated to balance polymer curing vectors against localized atmospheric wind speeds—the production methodology relied on a singular, decisive application of the foam substrate.
By inverting the uncured framework onto the sediment and utilizing the sustained, thirty-minute somatic weight of my body as a compress, the material interface mechanically registered the tectonic relief, permanently binding localized sand aggregates and a singular, indexical stone into the synthetic matrix of the polymer. Rather than isolating the studio from the field, this site-specific materialization became a live socio-ecological con-tact zone. Spontaneous dialogical interactions [aka conversations] with local beach-goers functioned as oral archives, layering the physical artifact with historical geographies that expose the tense, shifting relations defin-ing the past and present of this specific littoral landscape.
The subsequent use of unusual shades of orange and pink in the studio painting phase positions the piece in an environment that is both benign and unsettling—a material critique of the fraught, metabolic frictions be-tween human industry, petrochemical architecture, and the living world.The painting’s critical complexity is generated through this precise collision of disparate material references, demonstrating how the structural contra-dictions between organic sediment and toxic polymers can evoke highly polarized, concurrent psychological reactions.
“This is a world between potential and determination, be-tween what has happened and what could, a world capt-ured in the tension of its present tense of becoming, a not yet enacted moment where we meet and greet our-selves in the affect that inspires action” –– Dewsbury et al., Enacting Geo-graphies, 2002: 439.
"Making art is really about doing. It’s not really about making 'things.' And the 'thing' must always just be what happens while you’re doing something interesting. The art can’t be the end––it can only be the residue of your activity. The act-ivity must be what’s important" ––JCD
This materialist destabilization holds particularly true within the expanded field of non-traditional landscape representation, as the work transitions from a passive window into an active, site-specific critique. By treating the artwork as a porous, relational threshold, this practice directly aligns with Olivia Mason and James Riding’s assertion that the contemporary land-scape can no longer be defined by its most simple description as an "area of inland scenery," once so often associated with landscape paintings. As the authors argue in their essay "Reimagining landscape: Materiality, de-coloniality, and creativity," the classical, Western colonial conceptualizations of landscape historically function as tools of exclusion, using clean, scan-nable, and reproducible representations to enforce colonial dominance and erase Indigenous spatial histories (Mason & Riding, 2023).
On one hand, I am deeply committed to these non-linguistic, illicit know-ings—the precognitive material encounters where an event is visibly un-folding, yet evades absolute cognitive capture. This idea of 'grasping with-out certainty' demands a sustained engagement with irreconcilability, transforming what could be an epistemological roadblock into a generative artistic vector. To navigate this threshold is to stay intentionally open to the turbulent discomfort of the unmastered and the incomplete, allowing the work to deepen its affective significance without becoming comfortable.
This commitment to the enigmatic is perpetually negotiated against a counter-desire for pedagogical dialogue, public dissemination, and external validation; the resulting friction manifests as a complex political and psy-chological negotiation over artistic sovereignty—a constant struggle be-tween retaining curatorial control and relinquishing the artifact to its own paradoxically autonomous terms within the public sphere. Ultimately, this tension does not weaken the work; rather, it mirrors the wider relational complexities of navigating a hyper-entangled, living world.
It is precisely within these relational complexities that I felt the analytical weight of the "text" required rigorous examination, positioning the inquiry at the intersection of critical discourse analysis and cultural theory to scrutinize how language and material forms continuously inflect and catalyze artistic expression. By parsing the boundaries between semantic meaning and physical presence, this lens illuminates how socio-political narratives do not merely exist alongside creative practice, but rather inhabit the very text-ures, weights, and spatial dimensions of the work itself.
While traditional discourse analysis isolates the textual container to written and spoken language—such as dialogue, historical archives, and trans-criptions—cultural analysis expands this semiotic horizon to treat any cult-ural artifact as a readable text (Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, 1995: 4). This expanded vantage point demon-strates that visual art, architectural assemblage, or acoustic composition do not merely exist as passive objects, but, instead, function as dense, discurs-ive texts; consequently, by analyzing these non-linguistic forms through a textual lens, this methodology exposes the hidden power structures, histor-ical contingencies, and relational networks that inform how meaning is constructed, contested, and circulated.
A profound manifestation of this expanded textuality occurs within Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which interrogates the deep cos-mological fractures between English and the Indigenous Potawatomi lang-uage (Kimmerer 2013, 53). Kimmerer demonstrates that while English is structurally dominated by nouns—an animate-to-inanimate linguistic flat-tening that mirrors the Capitalocene's emphasis on commodification, ownership, and isolated individualism—the Potawatomi lexicon shifts prior-ity toward verb-driven relationality. With verbs comprising approximately seventy percent of the Potawatomi language compared to a mere thirty percent in English, this morphosyntactic divergence yields an animacy-centred worldview that grants vibrant agency to the living world. The grammar of Potawatomi transforms static objects into active, ongoing pro-cesses; a hill or a bay is not a passive noun to be possessed, but a state of being, a collaborative happening. This linguistic architecture exposes a crit-ical feedback loop wherein language does not merely describe reality, but actively structures how material forms, ecological relations, and artistic expressions are co-authored, perceived, and valued across divergent cult-ural landscapes.
Similarly, postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha has stated that a translation is a signification that is always incomplete and ongoing (Jonathan Ruther-ford, The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha, 1990: 210). Therefore, interpretations and translations, as transformations, are ambivalent con-structions that test the limits of what was previously deemed attainable. This ambivalence in translation exemplifies its metaphorical capability to demonstrate the irreconcilability between language and art. My recognit-ion of these irreconcilable ongoings is a simple cautionary prompt to note the inconclusiveness that exists all around us, that we have learned to live with as both normalcy and truth.
In doing so, this process prompts a critical reflection on the generation of meaning within structural contradiction, positioning each work in the exhibition as a material vector that invites viewers to confront their own interpretations of irreconcilability. Rather than seeking a clean synthesis, these forms challenge the observer to navigate the persistent friction be-tween internal psychological states and external sociopolitical, and eco-logical realities. By constructing an immersive, relational environment, the work deliberately disrupts conventional aesthetic boundaries to expose the dense, untamed complexities of the human and nonhuman experience. Ultimately, this intervention sought to provoke dialogues centred on syst-emic resilience, mutual acceptance, and the volatile beauty that emerges when seemingly irreconcilable forces are allowed to cohabitate.
"The stumbling blocks of a translation frequently exist at its most productive points. Their usual first effect is frustration caused by obstinate resistance (on both sides), but, in their ever-renewed demand for conjecture, these apparent ob-stacles can allow us to escape the cramped, habitual post-ures of our own thought”––From Betsy Wing's Introduction to Éduard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, 1997: xi.
The sculpture “fascination with the auratic authority of the artistic act and the artist's role” (below) materializes this specific conceptual friction. Driven by an investigation into the dynamics of ownership, possession, and ident-ity, the project originated during a period of dense research and dialogue with my studio advisor, Anna Sprague, regarding my lifelong impulse to collect; indeed, when she suggested that this habit might be a selfish act of hoarding—a desire to accumulate and possess that functions as a systemic byproduct of colonial education—I initially resisted, framing my beach-combing instead as a responsible act of environmental cleanup. This initial resistance exposed a deeper tension between my conscious ecological in-tent and the unexamined structures of acquisition underlying my practice, a friction that ultimately shifted the collecting process from a simple act of retrieval into a complex site of self-interrogation.
As I looked closer at the vast archive of objects, images, stories, and other various research materials I had amassed over the years, her question began to fester; consequently, the uncomfortable mixing of these ideas—collecting, coloniality, and selfhood—ultimately crystallized into the core concept of the work. If identity is merely a tumbling mass of traits, beliefs, and expressions that become inextricably enmeshed to characterize an individual, the sculpture functions as an inquiry into the vessel that holds, carries, and transports this entangled history into the future.
The conceptual inquiry manifests physically through an amalgamation of diverse objects and materials, meticulously co-curated within a repurposed beach lounge chair and pull cart hybrid; the structure holds several globe-like forms, each an amalgamation of found objects, organic matter, and human detritus harvested from the littoral zone of Lower East Chezzetcook. In addition to these spheres is a network of weathered ropes, a discarded lobster claw, and a fragment of wooden lobster trap wreckage, the latter intricately crafted with a system of holes and tunnels bored by insects. By listening closely to these dis-parate elements, each is allowed to speak from its own distinct history; together, they coalesce into a polyvocal narrative that bridges the over-lapping trajectories of both human and non-human worlds, allowing the materials to exist as an open-ended archive rather than a collection of static trophies. Crucially, the carrier is primed with white gesso, in the same manner one primes a canvas, preparing the carrier to hold information as it travels into a speculative future.
"fascination with the auratic authority of the artistic act and the artist’s role"
Materials: Adapted beach lounge chair/pull cart, found objects including various types of rope, a lobster claw, wooden lobster
trap wreckage. and sculptural balls made from human
detritus collected from beaches.
As an ontological investigation, the carrier interrogates the nature of being and thingness, deliberately inducing a breakdown in the conventional util-ity of the object. Drawing from Heideggerian phenomenology, particularly his analysis of the 'ready-to-hand' (Zuhandenheit)—wherein an artifact, tool, or piece of equipment remains unnoticed and socially transparent precisely as long as it functions smoothly within our network of purposes (Heidegger, Being and Time, 1962: 98–102)—the carrier intentionally steps outside the circuit of daily utility, prompting the viewer to confront its raw, unmapped material presence, its “thingness” (Brown, “Thing Theory,” 2001: 4). By enacting what Object-Oriented Ontology terms an essential 'with-drawal' from total human comprehension, the carrier's material config-uration acknowledges that its internal essence cannot be fully exhausted by the viewer's gaze (Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, 2018: 9). This work is not a finished, static monument meant to be easily consumed, but rather a site of active ontological labour where the porous boundaries between the writing subject (researcher / artist) and the material world (sculptural object) are continuously negotiated and remade (Hall, Held & McGrew, Modernity and Its Futures, 1992: 276).
Furthermore, drawing on a Marxian critique, this project seeks to reclaim artistic production from capitalist and colonial circuits of accumulation, wherein human labour is routinely reduced to autonomous, fetishized commodities (Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1., 1976: 163). To disrupt this mystification, the project shifts the critical focus from the finished product to the process of making. Here, the artwork’s material carrier, or support, is activated as a register of the concurrent physical and mental labour demanded across the studio, the archive, and the field. Under this cohesive framework, the cognitive exertion of the academic research, writing and artistic conceptualization is deeply entangled with the physical endurance required to extract and remediate the work's materials. By treating environmental cleanup and institutional production as twin vectors of a singular practice, the acts of editing text and harvesting salvage function symmetrically to interrogate the extractive parameters of colonial schooling. Ultimately, this approach offers a counter-point to the systemic drive to accumulate and possess, bridging theory and praxis through a somatic and intellectual commitment to material reclamation.
As such, the carrier mirrors the overarching structural intention of the document itself; because this project operates symmetrically as both a text-based critique and a studio-based research-creation, the carrier fun-ctions as a visible testament to both. It is not just a container for text, but rather a physical object that embodies the theoretical arguments written within it. By making the connection between material making and intel-lectual writing tangible, this framework fulfills a deliberate pedagogical aim, demonstrating to the viewer how its physical and mental labour are inseparable. Within this operative threshold—where art, life, and pedagogy entangle—the integration of Ted T. Aoki’s curriculum theory becomes im-perative. By dissolving the boundaries between the classroom, the studio, and the living world, Aoki’s relational ontology provides the infrastructure to activate this thesis as a pedagogical intervention.
Aoki, a foundational Japanese-Canadian curriculum scholar, radically re-conceptualized educational spaces through his formulation of a 'living curriculum' rooted in relationality, inquisitive pedagogy, and the ontology of the 'and.' Within Aokian thought, this conjunctive 'and' serves as a critical, liminal intersection where disparate trajectories of meaning collide, entangle, gestate, and transfigure into entirely new semiotic possibilities. In his essay 'Metonymic Moment #5: Translation/Transformation,' for example, Aoki illustrates this generative friction by examining how nineteenth-century Japanese linguists grappled with translating the Western con-struct of 'individualism'—a concept fundamentally absent from the Japan-ese lexicon. Rather than forcing a direct equivalent, they situated the sub-jectivity of the pronoun 'I' within the intertextual space between 'individual' and 'Hito' (person), coining the hybrid term Kojin (see Pinar & Irwin, Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki, 2005: 317–321).
While the English 'individual' etymologically denotes an indivisible, self-contained, and isolated unit of personhood, the Japanese Kojin reflects an inherent relationality, signifying that the self is inextricably bound to the other. Although linguistically Japanese, Kojin operates as a hybrid construct forged within an intercultural and interlinguistic space of difference, per-manently bearing the trace of its Western counterpart. The formation of Kojin ultimately demonstrates that absolute translation is impossible; in-stead, meaning-making must occur within the generative, untranslatable intervals of cultural contact.
"Weird(o)s: untouchable articles of a self that does not yet know it is ruined"
Materials: wooden dowels and furniture legs, cop-per pipe and fittings, dynamic nylon rope, stainless steel fish hooks, deconstructed rope fibres, latex balloons, silicone, synthetic rubber, a fallen sapling, spray paint, and a variety of lacquers.
"Hoof-like"
Materials: raw oak, milled & kiln-dried pine, plastic bottles,
synthetic fabric, wood glue, and stainless steel staples.
The words perverted, revolting, meandering, and gestation—which form the critical subtext of this thesis' title—signify the complex conceptual and physical parameters underfoot, anchoring the specific space I occupy as a queer, white male settler within the geopolitical landscape currently known as Canada. This terminology demands an unflinching look at the pervasive, perverted history of colonialism and its ongoing impact on con-temporary life, exposing how the protracted, gestative process of nation-hood relies on the deliberate obscuring of violent histories. As I glimpse the glass, metal, and concrete facades of the modern cityscape, noting where older signage of capitalist enterprise has been either relocated or perm-anently abandoned, this architectural layer reveals how the establishment of contemporary infrastructure has violently transformed the environment into an anthropocentric object, effectively obscuring the natural world beneath a rigid layer of corporate development. By permanently blurring the boundaries between ecological systems and technological develop-ment, the urban fabric frustrates any simplistic separation of nature and technology, complicating our critical understanding of how these concepts are structurally enmeshed.
"Progress means: to step out of the magic spell, even out of the spell of progress that is itself nature, in that humanity becomes aware of its own inbred nature and brings to a halt the domination it exacts upon nature and through which domination by nature continues. In this way it could be said that progress occurs where it ends" (Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, 1963/2005, 150).
This engagement with linguistic reappropriation and structural subversion directly resonates with the work of queer theorist Lee Edelman, who, in his foundational essay “The Future Is Kid Stuff,” posits that the radical strategic value of queerness lies in its structural refusal to comply with the symbolic reality of “reproductive futurism” (Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, 2004: 1–31). Rather than seeking validation or social inclusion within the dominant order, Edelman aligns queerness with the Lacanian death drive, framing it as an internal force that exposes and disrupts the ideological figures of meaning societies are conditioned to defend at all costs. Consequently, to inhabit this position means acknow-ledging that the literal truths of our existence are bound up in a restrictive symbolic fabric that must be contested rather than rehabilitated. By shift-ing the critical focus away from liberal narratives of cultural hybridity or essentialist demands, Edelman’s framework prompts a rigorous engage-ment with the negativity of the queer subject, establishing a vital method-ology for understanding how minority subjectivities navigate pivotal his-torical moments (Edelman 1998: 24). Ultimately, this perspective uses the force of "disidentification" not to build a comfortable, inclusive society, but to radically rupture the very architecture of the social itself, providing a theoretical architecture for an artistic practice that refuses to placate instit-utional expectations (Edelman 1998: 27).
Edelman’s insistence on radical rupture and the deliberate engagement with queer negativity offered an analytical entryway for my investigative field-work, shaping the methodology through which I approached the physical and historical complexities of the landscape. As I immersed myself in disparate research methods—spanning reading, archival documentary viewing, site visits, and localized interviews—I continuously encountered deep-seated narratives of violence, displacement, disorientation, homo-phobia, and misogyny, alongside the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Reflecting on the intricate interplay between memories, trauma, and topography, it became apparent that historical violence holds the capacity to etch a permanent scar not only into our collective conscious-ness but across the broader geographical landscape, prompting an inquiry into how these scarred terrains inevitably give rise to what Avery Gordon conceptualizes as a “ghostly presence”—an acute societal absence that is actively felt (Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2008: 8).
Within the mixed-media painting, sculpture, and installation combine titled “between / no longer / and / not yet” (below), I inserted my physical and psychological self into such a space of lack, mobilizing Jacques Derrida’s framework of hauntology to trace the lingering, spectral impact of a scarred narrative across time and space, and how that past persist-ently haunts and structures the contemporary moment (Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, 1994: 10). This process required remaining acutely mindful of the enduring, traumatic legacies wrought by neoliberal, religious, and militarized colonial subjugation, forces that continue to inflict profound and volatile effects on both Indigenous and non-Indigenous bodies—including my own—as well as what posthumanist thinker Donna Haraway describes as the interconnected “naturecultures” of lands and ecosystems (Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Other-ness, 2003: 8). This structural, intergenerational scarring has become deeply ingrained in our collective existence, functioning as a somatic imprint that resonates with contemporary theories of cellular memory, continuously alt-ering the very epigenetic fabric of our bodies and permanently anchoring historical wounds within the physical present.
The thinking behind this work burrows through the logical foundations of the contemporary polycrisis, explicitly confronting the melancholic and negative aspects of coexistence that weigh upon our collective conscious-ness, an investigation that mirrors Mark Fisher’s analysis of capitalist real-ism and its systemic production of social exhaustion (Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, 2009: 19). However, rather than remaining suspended in despondency or a paralysis of grief, the work revolted toward the prospect of evolution and revolution, pivoting toward a more playful, meandering, and anarchic existence that aligns with Hakim Bey’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) as a site of immediate liberation (Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Ter-rorism. 2003: 99). Consequently, “between / no longer / and / not yet” oper-ates as an aesthetic, murmuring fusion of political, ecological, philosoph-ical, and technological voices, several of which find articulation within this thesis. Ultimately, this interdisciplinary research approach—which culti-vated an understanding of the human experience as a series of entangled, vibrant material relations rather than isolated entities—generates a pro-found desire to unearth the playful and joyful dimensions of art and life, offering a tactical means to illuminate the strange, and at times, dark spaces we are all forced to navigate.
"between / no longer / and / not yet"
Materials: Acrylic and oil paint on canvas, wooden
support structure, rusted metal bracket and nails,
insulated reflective vapour barrier, steel staples,
and aluminum duct tape.
The terms 'between', 'no-longer,' 'and,' 'not-yet' are neither endings nor beginnings — they are descriptive of a state of transition, contingency,
and difference. . .
in
places
of in-between
and at the edge of
other places that hover
between past, present, and future,
circular and repetitive journeys
excavating memory, anti-memory
and the mis-registrations
that invariably occur
when looking from the present
back toward the past,
acknowledging the parallax
that occurs when one looks at a time
from another place.
The methodological impulse to track the lingering, spectral impacts of historical wounds across time directly mirrors William James’ foundational conception of the "stream of consciousness," wherein the stream of thought functions as a carefully chosen image for the volatile flux of human subjectivity (James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890: 180). James uses this metaphor to describe how ideas, feelings, and sensations—both present and past—cohere into the experience of a continuous, flowing self, the ever-present “I”, which meanders through the mind from childhood until our deaths, and possibly beyond. James suggests that consciousness alights, much like a bird alights, which is to say that specific thoughts arrive to us consciously—through a kind of stasis. However, he suggests that valuable thinking, transitive thinking, the bulk of thinking, is unconscious, a never-ending stream that moves between all of the more fixed, conscious thoughts.
This thinking led me to reconsider Bruno Latour’s “Parliament of Things,” wherein he argues that law and politics should not be organized around people alone, but rather between all things and life (Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 1993: 142). Latour's provocative human to nonhuman think-ing sparked a series of questions concerning difference. For example, how do we come to understand difference? Are there limits to acceptable differ-ence? How can difference be recognised and accepted as such? How can a "just" society accommodate different lifeways? Who is it that gets to decide on boundaries of exclusion? And, how can the active capacity of the body recreate its world and empower, renew, and reorient itself in the face of adversity and oppression?
This line of questioning is politicised by my awareness of the crisis involving the subject in contemporary society and the forms its representation takes. It serves as a metaphor for the complex and evolving nature of identity.
"[...] what sustains the entire process of becoming-subject is the will to-know, the desire to say, the desire to speak; it is a founding, primary, vital, necessary and therefore original desire to become (conatus)" — from Rosi Braidotti's "Writing as a Nomadic Subject," 2014: 169.
“Wholly Holey Holy”
Materials: Wooden shelf, primer, glass wine jugs, seaweed,
MDF molding, wood filler, wood screws, and wire.
The work titled “Wholly Holey Holy” (above) enacts a critical, paradoxical deconstruction of traditional theological and philosophical paradigms, challenging the premise that divine perfection requires an unblemished state. It suggests instead that the truly sacred encompasses human brokenness, vulnerability, and the somatic totality of lived experience. This homophonic wordplay functions as a direct subversion of absolute truth by exploiting the friction between phonetic harmony and graphic rupture. This linguistic strategy deeply resonates with Jacques Derrida’s critique of logocentrism and the operations of différance, where meaning is never stable but continually deferred and fractured through the written signifier (see Derrida's essay “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, 1982; and Of Grammatology, 1976).
When spoken, the words collapse into a singular auditory presence, fabricating a deceptive illusion of unity that mirrors totalizing ideological systems. This auditory oneness traps the listening ear in a false sense of metaphysical wholeness. However, the graphic inscription of the text introduces an immediate visual rupture, exposing the literal presence of gaps, holes, and lacks. By weaponizing this schism between speech and the written word, the work demonstrates how absolutist claims mask internal voids. The graphic text betrays the sonic harmony, revealing the dominant framework’s inability to conceal its own contradictions, and ultimately forcing a radical rereading of language as an inherently unstable structure.
The physical architecture of the installation manifests this inquiry through the symmetrical placement of six empty wine jugs directly upon an altar. Operating as silent disciples, these vessels sit alongside a loaf of dried seaweed that replaces the traditional sacramental bread, reconfiguring the familiar material vocabulary of the Eucharist. This specific alignment of objects on the altar surface opens a conceptual space to negotiate ideas surrounding Christian promises of redemption and the expectation of unwavering faith in institutional structures. Rather than imposing a defin-itive refutation, replacing the promise of divine nourishment with an interrogation of sacred perfection, the ritual is re-grounded within the shifting, vulnerable parameters of human and ecological becoming.
By shifting the installation to ground level, the work reconfigures the spectator’s somatic orientation within the gallery space; the traditional verticality of ecclesiastical architecture—which historically commands an upward gaze of awe or a highly regulated posture of kneeling—is replaced by an unscripted, earthbound choreography. To engage with the low-profile assembly, viewers find themselves altering their typical upright posture, bending the spine, crouching low, or carefully casting their eyes downward; this physical tilt disrupts the detached, linear momentum of the standard gallery stroll and induces a heightened awareness of one's own corporeal presence.
The work actively refuses the clean, disembodied isolation of traditional presentation criteria, choosing instead a gritty, worn, interactive surface of public friction; here, anchored within this heavily trodden zone, the sacred is stripped of its pristine armour; the work intentionally gathers dust. Through this grounded staging, the installation enacts what philosopher Giorgio Agamben conceptualizes as profanation—the deliberate deactiv-ation of sacred power in order to return an object to common human use and play—meaning the work becomes inextricably entangled with actual debris, heavy footsteps, and the raw dynamics of a community-engaged space, ultimately transforming a site of elite contemplation into a locus of shared social friction (Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” in Profanations, 2007: 73–92).
Furthermore, the literal vulnerability of the work—resting directly on the highly trafficked floor—introduces an immediate tension between hazard and care, prompting the viewer to consciously calibrate their stride to avoid disrupting the fragile arrangement. This cautious navigation shifts the act of viewing from a purely intellectual exercise into an active, tactile nego-tiation—one where the visitor's footsteps, shifting weight, and physical proximity become inextricably enmeshed with the scuffed floor, the aroma of the seaweed, and the shared reality of the communal space.
"[...] Each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that multiplicity is continually trans-forming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors" (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980-87, 249).
The works titled “An all-male, cockratic environment” and “Envy” (below) elicit resonances of youthful homoerotic longing and an allure for both human and aquatic bodies, repurposing salvaged fishing equipment to generate structures that function as sculptural tributes. During the fabrication of these works, I immersed myself in queer ecologies, progressive queer sexologies, and queer liberationist theory to cultivate a deeper understanding of the historically contested parameters of queer-ness, including my own lived trajectory. The resulting assemblages delve into the intricate interplay of social, political, religious, and geographical forces that continually mold the subtle dynamics of shame, the gaze, and the libido within queer cultures. Throughout this creative process, I remained acutely aware of the pervasive threats to identity—often bound up with forbidden erotic desires—that are systematically criminalized by overarching authoritarian power structures and routinely stigmatized by family, community, and peers.
"An All-Male Cockrocratic Environment"
Materials: Found lobster trap wreckage, various ropes,
paper towel, matte medium rubber balloons, a rock,
string, wire, oil paint and spray paint.
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"[...] A pink triangle manifests resistance against per-sistent bourgeois normativity, changing its routine into a libidinal and political event"––Bożena Shallcross, "The Pink Triangle and Gay Camp Identity in Marian Pankowski's Writings," 2011: 521.
"Envy"
Materials: Acrylic paint, found objects, cock ring,
leather strap with snap fastener, rubber balloon,
partially deconstructed nylon fishing rope.
"Because We Do What You Do Before You Do It"
Materials: Wooden support, digital prints on plain and vellum papers, acrylic matte medium, silicone and rust rubbing on
paper, a steel pin, oil and spray paints, and salvaged materials:
tree branch, milled wood, styrofoam bodyboard, mason jars,
lobster trap debris.
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The artwork titled “Because We Do What You Do Before You Do It” (above) operates along a parallel trajectory of inquiry, navigating the violent historical etymology of the word “fag” to map how its roots—deeply entangled with the systemic oppression of women, and more generally femininity—simultaneously fuel animosity toward feminine expression in boys and men. This investigation traces how societal investments in andro-centrism and toxic masculinity cause the feminizing weight of the slur to be felt as an existential threat, directly riffing on the reductive portrayals of manhood enforced by mainstream media, political rhetoric, paternal auth-ority, and the hyper-masculine arena of the locker room. Concurrently, the installation considered the recent linguistic reappropriation of the term within queer communities as a strategic mechanism to strip the word of its derogatory "lesser-than" status. Ultimately, the work was fabricated in re-cognition of 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals globally who, despite navigating systemic violence, continue to pioneer transformative spaces of joy, creat-ivity, and resilience.
The genesis of these three works is rooted in the critical discourse on heteronormative, patriarchal arrogance and the affective mechanics of envy. Originating from a widespread societal emphasis on hegemonic masculinity, this structural envy functions as a regulatory mechanism that actively marginalizes any bodily or relational expression falling outside this established masculine ideal. In effect, this work recognizes both the sub-jects who play a complicit role in creating and sustaining these hostile environments, and the profound precarity faced by those working to de-construct these structural narratives while simultaneously striving to cultiv-ate hope and love within them.
Post-Foucauldian (Foucault, 1978), feminist (Butler, 1990), anti-colonial (Lug-ones, 2007), Indigenous (TallBear & Willey, 2019), and much queer scholar-ship (Halberstam, 2005; Puar, 2007) posits that the conventional Euro-west-ern, ego-indexed notion of sex is not at all natural. Terms such as heterosex-uality or homosexuality, contrary to what their histories suggest, effectively have very little to do with nature. Queer Ecologies (Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson, 2010; Hessler, 2021), a development within Queer theory (Sedg-wick 1990), adopts theories from Queer liberationist theory (Gay Liberation Front, 1971; McKenzie, 2016) and progressive Queer sexologies (McGruer, 2006; Johnson, 2016; Saraswati & Shaw, 2020) to offer a corrective to the notion that "natural" is equivalent to straight and that "queer" is antithetical to nature (Mulé 2019: 19–37).
Furthermore, Kim TallBear’s critique of the settler-colonial project demon-strates how nation-building systematically disrupts the vitality of Indigen-ous kinship through the violent imposition of heteronormative monogamy and the nuclear family structure (TallBear 2018: 145-64). This intervention radically reframes these relational configurations not as natural or evolut-ionary constants, but as artificial architectures engineered through elab-orate social constructionist paradigms. When read through the matrix of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, these state-sanctioned family models function as technologies of enclosure designed to police desire, privatize intimacy, and break down collective relationality. Consequ-ently, destabilizing these naturalized structures exposes them as regulatory mechanisms of capital accumulation and territorial dispossession rather than inherent forms of human organization.
"Queerness poses an otherwise; it gives an offering of some-thing else to come. Intersectional scholar Sara Ahmed's writing on queer vandalism is useful here. Queers are per-ceived as a threat because we use things differently. By taking an object and using it in ways it was not intended, as a queer person you become a threat to the world, to the patriarchy [...] That is very much what sex ecologies are about as well, breaking with the capitalist way of life that is now ruining all life on the planet" (helander 2021: 121).
Similarly, Audre Lorde’s formulation of the erotic operates as a form of queer vandalism—a radical refusal to utilize the body according to its prescribed, capitalist function. By elucidating how the erotic transcends mere sexual mechanics, Lorde positions this somatic resource not as a site of commodified indulgence, but as an un-alienated wellspring of creative knowledge and collective liberation. When read alongside Helander’s invo-cation of Sara Ahmed, the erotic becomes an intentionally misused tool; it breaks with the heteropatriarchal and extractive imperatives of the domin-ant lifeworld by reclaiming somatic joy as a vector of ecological and political resistance:
"When we begin to live from within outward [...] in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense..." (growbean 2019: 16:47-17:19).
From the perspective of queer vandalism and sex ecologies, formations of intimacy are structurally bound to the socio-political and philosophical paradigms that govern human organization, spiritual epistemologies, and our relational orientation toward the planet. Throughout the research-creation process of this thesis, it became evident that while the material generation of art inevitably prompts sites of visceral connection and sensuality, the finalized object is not inherently erotic. Rather, when viewed through Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer vandalism, the erotic resides precisely within the process of making as a form of intentional misuse. By refusing to treat salvaged materials or the body as passive instruments of capitalist and heteropatriarchal production, this creative methodology enacts a profound degree of aesthetic commitment and somatic respons-iveness.
Approaching the material through imaginative, affective, and existential registers breaks with extractive imperatives, transforming the active practice of making into an ecological intervention, not through mere environmental commentary, but by actively disrupting the metabolic and ontological flows of colonial capitalism. Firstly, this work subverts extractive time; the prolonged somatic commitment to processes of searching, thinking, salvaging, writing, experimenting, making, and editing enforces a radical deceleration that rejects capitalist efficiency metrics. Secondly, the work enacts a physical metamorphic remediation; by gathering discarded matter like weathered ropes and insect-bored wreckage, the process directly interrupts the landscape of abandonment, re-routing the forgotten, neglected, and overlooked 'waste' away from landfill trajectories and into vital circuits of pedagogical utility. Finally, by approaching these salvaged fragments through affective and existential registers, the methodology refuses the Western, ego-indexed reduction of the planet to a passive storehouse of resources. Instead, it models a non-instrumental mode of coexistence where the lifeworld and its remnants are treated as active participants in a co-constitutive framework of making. Consequently, the material output does not emerge as a static, commodified fetish, but functions as an active archive that indexes this residual—often erotic—labour and ecological resistance.
While all societies navigate complex interpersonal dynamics, the Western reification of sex and spirituality into distinct, manageable categories raises critical questions about how these conceptual limitations constrain human intimacy and relational well-being. By slicing the somatic reality of sex away from transcendent or affective dimensions, Euro-Western modernity en-forces a dualistic taxonomy that renders both domains instrumental, highly policed, and easily commodified. From the perspectives of sex ecologies and queer vandalism, this conceptual compartmentalization is not an intel-lectual error, but rather a structural violence that severs the foundational entanglement between the body, the community, and the lifeworld. It forces human intimacy into isolated, privatized, and heteronormative con-figurations designed to feed capitalist circuits of production rather than sustain collective vitality.
To challenge this containment, the strategic deployment of the erotic—reclaimed here through artistic praxis—functions as an intentional misuse of these rigid, western categories. By refusing to relegate sex to mechanical biology and psychically to institutional dogma, a queer ecological method-ology reunites these severed registers, treating psychosomatic intimacy as a profound site of ecological and philosophical knowledge. Reintegrating these dimensions destabilizes the extractive logic that views both human bodies and the planet as passive resources to be managed and depleted. Ultimately, dismantling these Western reifications expands the parameters of relational well-being, transforming intimacy from a confined, individual asset into an active, planet-centered mode of coexistence and resistance.
"Intimacy builds worlds; it creates spaces and usurps places for other kinds of relation. Its potential failure to stabilize closeness always haunts its persistent activity, making the very attachments deemed to buttress "a life" seem in a state of constant if latent vulnerability" (Berlant 1988: 282).
In the work titled My Father from 300 Years Ago in Scotland, the intent-ional reliance on the vibrant materiality (Bennett, 2010) of things serves to externalize the deeply sedimented histories of masculine violence. Rather than acting as mere passive illustrations of 'toxic masculinity,' the chosen substrates—a meticulously burnished piece of oak smothered by plastic detritus, weathered lumber, rusty spikes, a powder-coated chain, and a discarded bait bag—operate as an affective assemblage of memory, phys-ically encoding the grit of predominantly masculine environments. The primary objective is to forge an immediate, somatic connection with the audience, utilizing the raw physical presence of the sculpture to bypass purely intellectual critique. While each medium carries its own intrinsic, historical weight, the work’s true narrative capacity emerges entirely within the volatile space between the object's corporeal reality and its sensory, psychological impact on the viewer.
"My Father from about 300 Years Ago in Scotland"
Materials: Found driftwood, powder coated metal link
chain, rusted metal spikes, metal eyelet hook, plastic
mesh bate bag, and single-use plastic detritus heat-
shrunk around maple tree branch segment
"Unnamed Haecceity #2"
Materials: Wooden support structures, canvas, perforated and non-perforated Masonite panelling, acrylic, oil and spray
paints, painted paper, wood, a sapling, acrylic sheeting,
found metal forms, wood screws, stainless steel staples
Institutional archaeological power structures have long relied on naming, classifying, and—particularly within Western colonial contexts—actively erasing subjugated histories. Here, the concept of haecceity, or 'this-ness,' along-side the Heideggerian interrogation of the 'thingness of things,' destabilizes these traditional silos of knowledge production by directly challenging the authority of these dominant structures. By asserting the irreducible singularity and vibrant autonomy of the object, these materialist frameworks resist the flattening categorization of the colonial archive. Consequently, meaning ceases to be something top-down or codified; in- stead, it emerges as a situated phenomenon forged through direct, em-bodied encounters. This relational field explicitly encompasses precognitive affect, somatic behaviour, fluid cognitions, and the non-linear flow of time, positioning the material artifact as an active participant in historical truth
The epistemic critique of Western archaeological categorization and archiv-al violence directly intersects with the systemic temporal amnesia of late-stage capitalist societies. Regrettably, contemporary civilizations routinely fail to acknowledge and appreciate the slow accumulation of time or our deep, reciprocal relationships with the material world. By neglecting the vital importance of reflecting on non-human elements, dominant political structures flatten these vibrant entities into insignificant, inert resources or trivial aesthetic backdrops. This failure of imagination is a direct symptom of the Capitalocene's demand for friction-free acceleration. However, these seemingly trivial material elements are actually essential participants in what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn characterizes as an open-ended, semi-otic process of 'thinking with' the world [Kohn 2013, 20–21]. In his seminal work, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Kohn demonstrates that life is inherently semiotic; non-human entities—from trees to fungal networks—interpret their environments, form rep-resentations, and generate meanings entirely independent of human language (Kohn 2013: 42, 81). By acknowledging these living, non-human thoughts, we can systematically dismantle the anthropocentric hubris that isolates us from our surroundings, allowing us to cultivate a far more profound, relational and ecological awareness.
Here, returning to Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture provides a critical lens for understanding how individuals form identities that exceed the sum of their constituent parts, specifically examining how subversive strategies of representation and empowerment emerge along lines of race, class, and gender (Bhabha 1994, 1–2). Rather than operating within the rigid, historical categories that establish exploitative and cruel hierarchies, Bhabha advocates for a radical shift away from narratives of originary or stable subjectivities. He directs focus instead toward the fluid, intermediate processes that erupt from within the thresholds of cultural difference. These liminal spaces, or 'Third Spaces,' foster tactical actions and mutant identity formations that open crucial avenues for both political contest-ation and multi-identity collaboration, ultimately restructuring the very concept of the social. When mapped onto Nigel Thrift’s non-represent-ational theory, Bhabha’s emphasis on tactical maneuvers, emergent identities, and collaborative contestation becomes a vital frame-work for capturing the precognitive, tactile, and affective dimensions of experience (Thrift, “It’s the little things,” 2000: 381). Consequently, this theoretical intersection directly informs the methodology of this thesis, grounding its exploration of relational identity and material interaction within complex, entangled landscapes.
The sculptural intervention "Unnamed Haecceity #1" (below) operates as a direct material critique of how objects acquire meaning under late-stage capitalism. While industrial capitalism uses reification to flatten lived rituals and ecological relationships into static, mass-produced commodities, this work reclaims reification as a site of dense phenomenological concentrat-ion. By trapping the fleeting textures of life-world rituals within its physical form, the sculpture establishes a speculative crucible to interrogate how consciousness, qualia, first-person perspective, and intentionality dynam-ically generate an approximation of meaning. Relying on the radical singu-larity of haecceity, the work counters the structural amnesia of contempor-ary life by entangling specific objects, memories, tools, and the markings of decay. This localized assemblage resists the uniform classification systems of the colonial archive and the capitalist database. Operating as a porous repository for temporal shifts and material memory, "Un-named Haecceity #1" utilizes its raw presence to bridge human interiority with the objective landscape, providing a tactile anchor for our collaborative becoming with-in a hyper-relational, living world.
"Unnamed Haecceity #2"
Materials: Stainless steel dryer drum, lint balls, felt, metal chain and screw hook fastener, digital photo- graphic re-production on paper, Bluetooth speaker, mp3 player, six audio tracks (23 minutes total) on loop function, a fan, and led lighting.
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“Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genea-logical tree. Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, pro-ducing a filiation or producing through filiation”––Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980/87: 239.
Evolution weaves countless metamorphoses. We embody intertwined histories, symbiotic connections, and a shared essence. We are a multitude of beings, converging,
existing in a constant state of flux
transitioning from what was
to what is
between / no longer / and / not yet
. . . to be continued.