Proximal Transmissions
Performed at The Roger Brown Museum, Chicago, IL, May 2015
The artist uses her body as a stand in for four generations of women in her family: her deceased maternal grandmother, her mother, herself, and her unborn (not conceived) daughter. The work is an autobiographical narrative that creates windows into the female experience of fertility, (wasted) potentiality, cyclical biology, the work addresses the maternal and the nurturing. Built into the narrative is a subtle but debilitating violence, it addresses a refusal of the womb while simultaneously nurturing and soothing the self by humming a lullaby. Further, by addressing the physicality of body itself, its processes and its texture, its perceived fragility and its resilience the artist extends the conversation to the potentiality of a larger, political, racial, and cultural body.