ABOUTNESS

Work-in-progress, 2023-

ABOUTNESS: A method of making (as writing, as art) that embraces the multiplicity of meaning.

That makes prevalent through form that everything means everything. 

When we ask, what is this about, we desire to distill a work of art into meaning. This carves away the excess—the process, the failures, the transformations—but in what remains we find an alternative value system that leads us into the queer praxis of material transformations. With what remnants we have, through care and intimacy, infinite ways of being are possible. My current work-in-progress ABOUTNESS plays with the excess beyond what something is about, introducing ambiguity (ness) and making a mess. I question the need to prescribe meaning and play with alternate trajectories for how we come to know and experience art. ABOUTNESS is a manuscript featuring poetry, essay, and performance score that explores art and play as interconnected intimacy-based, socially-engaged practices. In this work, I seek to break open language again and again, avoiding the question--what’s this about--through experiments in lineation and slippage. ABOUTNESS begins from a place of uncertainty and imagines art-making processes that center ways to exist and live meaningfully in the contemporary moment. As I explore meaning in the thresholds of aboutness, I seek out new models for being present and engaging in public life. In conversation with the experimental text and multimedia components of this project, I am also researching and writing about contemporary artists whose work demonstrates methods of meaning-making I’m interested in through ABOUTNESS.

An early piece emerging from this project, Opera Seria, is a poem and performance score that corresponds with a multimedia performance of the same name. Opera Seria is an engagement with material, waste and improvisation of what is available and disposable. In the precarity of each state, what might combust or transform? What might emerge from the rubble? Influenced by the work of Stephen Varble, I approach the assemblage of refuse as a path to queer worldmaking and its potential to transform body into medium. I collect what has been rejected (trash) and recontextualize it into a sculptural landscape, which becomes a stage for performance recorded and projected through live camera feed. This piece interrupts the act of decomposition through an improvised and momentary composition of form, only for that form to break apart once more.