The Unsettlements

Begun in 2018, The Unsettlements is a long-term series of projects that delve into sites of memory, silence, and ancestry, particularly in Houston and across so-called Texas, locations where eight generations of my mainly German settler-colonial family have lived since the early nineteenth century. So far, there have been four large-scale installations—at Lawndale Art Center in Houston in 2019, Artpace in San Antonio in 2022, Texas State Galleries in San Marcos in 2023, and the Art Gallery of Guelph in 2024—as well as a number of books, videos, performances, interventions, walkthroughs, chapbooks, and more. These two videos that I made for a grant opportunity in 2024 might give you another idea of the project:

The project delves into geography, family, and historical narratives with all of their unreliability and their surprise. An attempt to imagine ways of unsettling genealogical claims, of grounding beyond white nationalism, and of challenging white supremacy and heterosexism. The project also thinks about lineage in terms of queer family, how queer/trans organizing, benevolence, and embodiment are also legacies passed down across generations. The Unsettlements: a series of on-going activities, rituals, investigations, creations, & writings that will continue and find new iterations over the span of the next years.

The Unsettlements: Moms at the Art Gallery of Guelph in Ontario, Canada (2023)

The Unsettlements: Moms at Texas State Galleries in San Marcos, Texas (2023)

The Unsettlements: Moms at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas (2022)

The Unsettlements: Mom at Artpace in San Antonio from November 17, 2022 – January 8, 2023.

From Artpace: “JD Pluecker presents a closet into which we can delve, wandering through ancestral sites and familial history.    Entering with two small needlepoint bricks that hold the door open, we walk into a gallery where family blood lineage and queer history live side by side.  It is a soft room with a plethora of collections upon which to immerse your attention.   

The Unsettlements: Moms is a starting point for the artist’s investigation into the lives and legacy of Claire D. Pluecker, their birth mom, and Linda L. Anderson, their dyke mom. The exhibition consists of “object poems” combining written and spoken words, graphite drawings, tracings, embroidery, found materials from land sites, and archival gems. To collect the materials, the artist visited over six physical sites in Texas and sourced through countless boxes of family documents belonging to both mothers (which the artist considers alternate sites). Their new works unearth complicated lives that are both familiar and different as the artist “attempts to consider the legacies of white supremacy and the wonders of queerness and femininity in the same space and time.

While Pluecker’s work typically is reunited with the sites or archives origins from which they were discovered, this exhibition marks a trepidatious and exciting entry into object making with new embroidered thread works.  This exhibition’s “object poems” begin a journey that will continue to evolve.”

Swamps Fly (2021)

The Unsettlements: Dad at Lawndale Art Center in Houston, Texas (2019)

This first exhibition of this work—The Unsettlements: Dad—was part of citysinging, the 2018/2019 Artist Studio Program Exhibition, curated by Laura August. The exhibition was focused on my father, on his life and his parents' lives in Houston from the 1910s through the 1970s. I worked with him, the archive, and other family members to identify sites of trauma, violence, memory, forgetting, or loss in the local area, and then did a series of rituals at those sites: observing, walking, wandering, using my phone camera to take video and photos, and finally gathering materials from the sites to make what became the "object poems" that are at the core of the exhibition. Originally assembled in my studio, in the gallery space, they have taken on new forms, mutating and transforming.

While they existed in the studio and in the gallery, these object poems and their corresponding videos became markers of a relationship between self, family, landscape, and history. Some of these sites hold moments of history that are not recognized or known as such; other sites are more well-known, though I would say all the sites are misunderstood and un-memorialized or inadequately memorialized. What happens if we stay in these spaces of trauma, violence, heterosexism, and white supremacy? What happens when we attempt to non-tell or anti-tell or un-tell stories of trauma and witness? How might we create rituals and procedures for collective processing of trauma?

The opening for this show was on Friday, June 21 from 6-8pm, and the show was open through August 18 at Lawndale Art Center, 4912 Main Street in Houston, Texas.

As part of the Lawndale show, I also published an artist book—also called The Unsettlements: Dad—that was a vital part of the exhibition and now carries the work beyond the run of the show. The book was released on July 13, 2019 in the space of the exhibit during a performance and conversation with the citysinging curator Laura August.

The book is a translation of the work journal I kept over the 2018-2019 Artist Studio Program year at Lawndale: a scrapbook of thinking, notes from studio visits, and other materials. The Unsettlements: Dad is a book object hand-lettered in pencil that is a translation of the work journal I kept: a scrapbook of thinking, notes from studio visits, Youtube videos, fragments of conversations with my dad, Instagram posts, tweets, book covers, organic material, and more. The book builds a larger universe of fragments that existed in parallel to (and in the afterlife of) the object poems and videos in the citysinging exhibition space. The book is an invitation to an intimate encounter with making of the work and the narratives behind it.

Copies of the book are available for a limited time for $20 by emailing me at plujo7 at gmail dot com.