John McHorter wanted his time clean. He wanted contained space– silence that we’ve never had. He wanted 4 minutes and 33 seconds precise, quiet, and enclosed.
He often tells her the tale of her making. He whispers it against the ears he sews to her head. He hums it while he smooths skin across bones, draws thread through flesh, cradles organs before setting them in place.
Our trash cans are filled with mementos of our daily experiences. What happens to this intricate personal archive once it is picked up and taken away? How much of it will lie forever amidst the irredeemable refuse of the modern landfill? A different perspective on garbage and on abjection itself might finally allow us to embrace questions like these.
of and about (FTM 10 Years Later) is an homage to the hidden corners of the late 2000s & early 2010s female-to-male transgender YouTube community that supported me and countless others during the early days of our transitions.
Within the palazzo and Nazi Germany, we can revisit such works to ask: How did this woman not see the atrocities around her? Why did she not speak up, or act differently?
“Preludes” speaks of an experience of collective time in the modern city as it fractures, interrupts, and repeats itself, eliciting a groundhog-day-esque feeling of recurring stasis and disillusionment.
The manifestation of our ideas on the physical plane need not be perfect, and it is quite a beautiful thing when we can liberate ourselves from these expectations.
As we abandon the melting pot theory, we can also abandon the standards of assimilation toward which many immigrants and people of color feel pressured to conform.
