Hello all,
Winter winds are soon to arrive here on the Gulf coast. The temperature is set to drop 40 degrees in a few hours tomorrow. It's a time for pulling plants inside and wrapping pipes. A time to prepare to hibernate or to ruminate on what has come before.
The Unsettlements: Moms is open in San Antonio through the first week of January. There is a small collection of photos here on my webpage. if you find yourself in South Texas, please do stop by and spend some time in the gallery. What I made in the space is a closet. A gallery as closet. A closet as gallery. A mother's closet is a multilayered space, a space of potentiality. A space for trying on new things or for storing the old. A space to emerge from or to remain inside. Boxes of old letters and paper. A plastic bin of half-finished needlepoint and embroidery projects. Skeletons in a dark corner. Little bits and pieces of a life or of others' lives. Detritus. The hypervalued and the unvalued. A hundred LIFE magazines providing refuge for silverfish and cockroaches. A bag of old pins.
Maybe the show at Artpace set up a closet to play in and to think in, and maybe I'll come out of the closet, and maybe I won't. Maybe I worked for all those months to set up a closet, and I'll do an event in the closet and then I will take it back down.
I'm both excited and overwhelmed to think about two events I'll be doing at the end of the run of the exhibition (more info below). Excited to have these two public presentations of the work, and overwhelmed by the content and the form of it. I realized during the seven weeks of the Artpace residency that this project with my moms is just beginning, in its early stages. Working with my moms is a process entirely different from the one with my dad. My residency at Lawndale to work with him in 2018-19 lasted a year. The exhibition came at the end of the year, and it felt like a culmination. Artpace felt like a beginning, a kernel of something.
A curator asked me to think about the work in the context of the white cube, with the expectations of museum-goers in mind. Several artists pushed me at the end of last year to reckon with the history of visual art, sculpture, video, performance. I have a strange relationship to visual arts spaces, having worked in them actively since 2012 when Project Row Houses invited me to do my first intervention in a space. I am no longer a newcomer to this work, and yet the questions proliferate, answers refuse to congeal. I'm used to this discomfortability, I belong to it.
Here is info on the two January events:
Reading & Talk - The Unsettlements: Moms
Sunday, January 8 from 2 – 3:30PM CST (In-Person - Link to Register)
I'll animate the space of the exhibition with reading, talking and performing, bringing voice into the installation. I'll try to grapple live with settler colonialism, reparations, feminism, and queer and artistic lineage. There will be (hopefully) humor and (definitely) tension, as I read the object poems in the show and attempt to reckon with the work in real time.
The show is open til January 8. I'd love to hear from you, whether you have seen it or not. I am because you are.
Xoxo,
JDP
Conversation on Lesbian Herstories and Archives
Thursday, January 5 @ 12pm - 1pm CST (Virtual - Link To Register)
A conversation between myself, lesbian feminist/writer/labor organizer Linda L. Anderson, and writer/filmmaker Alexis Clements who volunteers with the Lesbian Herstory Archives. We will have a conversation about lesbian herstory and archives as proof of existence and artistic material. We'll talk about unearthing complicated lived connections and consider the wonders of queerness and femininity while using reconstructive modes of creativity.
