What was the genesis of Not Flowers?
I’ve been making these pieces for years — they originated out of materials that were given to me. I had a friend who dropped off this old window screen, and then I had another friend that had dropped off all of this old wedding fabric. So it was all this white mesh, and white see-through fabric. I started building these frames and using the materials and I created these window-like structures that resembled paintings, how they’re stretched on canvas, but using white see-through material and mesh and suspending objects in between the mesh.
With this show, I had in mind a new body of work that had to do with the same type of sculptural pieces with the same materials — but adding color.
But for me, the visual work has always been this balancing out of my writing practice. And at the time, I had been interrogating the word “not,” and thinking about its use linguistically — when we use “not” and why we use the word “‘not.” Instead of just claiming something is something, why we will default to saying something is not something instead.
Someone had asked me, what is some of the imagery that first made you feel sexually aroused? And I kind of started laughing because it was Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers. It’s a funny one, right? Because it was images of flowers. Later, I came to realize that Georgia O’Keeffe spent much of her life claiming that those paintings were flowers and the viewers observing them, including her husband, were saying they were sexual imagery, including myself. It didn’t strike me as flowers. It was not flowers. And so I decided that I wanted to make a whole collection of colorful works using the sculptural materials that alluded to floral imagery, or the way light hits color in nature, but call it “Not Flowers.”
And then I wrote this long essay where I put all of my thoughts about the interrogation of the word “not” and the imagery of flowers. I ended up reading it at the opening. The essay ended up weaving in this other experience that I didn’t expect: I had a car accident at the beginning of the pandemic and I had to physically recover over a long period of time. And part of that recovery for me is that when I was building my physical strength again, I started building these pieces again — they require a lot of balance and strength because they’re often larger frames. I’m pulling this fabric that’s delicate, and holding it while I adhere it to the frame. It requires a lot of gentleness, but also tension.
I built these pieces and looked at them and realized that in a lot of ways, I was creating these windows of my own recovery. And I didn’t consciously realize that that was so much a part of this show until I wrote the essay. In writing the essay, I realized that I was confronting my own reckoning with a near death experience. And something that I had realized in this interrogation of the word “not” is that after this car accident, I had kept waking up, and I would ask anyone who was in the room with me, “Am I still dead?” And they would be like, “You are not.” So the word “not” haunted that memory for me. My only audible recognition of still being in this world was someone saying the word “not.”
They didn’t say “You’re alive.” Just, “You’re not dead.” And so I had to figure out what that meant for me. I had this relief of “Oh, you are not.” But then what are you? I didn’t know: am I okay? There was no hopeful reassurance of when I would be functioning fully.
So many times we stumble around trying to find a language for an experience we’re having. Oftentimes, when I’m in my most courageous state of expressing vulnerability, I’m often met with someone else being like, “not,” — “no, that’s not what happened,” or “no, that’s not what I’m feeling.” And so I was thinking about how we can all be in the same room, having the same experience, but feeling or observing the different elements of that room. And so in some ways, those multiple truths exist. What is my reality could be a not reality for you.
I also thought, it’s kind of funny to title the show “it’s not something,” and have people walk into a room and be like, “then what is it?” It opens the door completely. For me, the show was really expansive because it was about the viewer. It was giving the viewer complete agency to walk through the room in shifting light and name whatever they were feeling for themselves.
Tell me about the collaborations with sound artists at your opening and then the movement artists at your closing.
In my process of recovery, I had two distinct moments of healing, one of which is that right after the car accident, I heard symphonies. It’s pretty common when you hit your head to have unexplained sensory experiences. For me, these symphonies were playing in response to really mundane sounds, like the washer and dryer, or sometimes people would talk and like tones of voice would get stuck, and then it would create its own sort of song. I thought, I’m just going to have to learn to live with these odd symphonies that are playing. They eventually did go away, but it totally has changed the way that I experience sound. And so for the opening, I reached out to a few friends of mine who are sound artists, who I’ve had dialogue with about their desire to focus on sound and their relationship to sound.
I thought, how incredible would it be to have a space that’s filled with sound and the shifting light and for people to walk through experiencing these pieces with live sound being played? And so that was my vision for the opening.
And with the closing I invited movement artists to move in the space, thinking, how incredible would it be to watch the shifting light and also watch the movement of these bodies slowly landing in space next to them? Because in so many ways, the pieces are their own encapsulated bodies. It was cool because once you invite someone in to perform, you have no idea what they will do and how they will experience it. These artists that I invited in felt touched by the pieces and I felt touched by their performances and our dialogue around them.
For me, while it’s a solo exhibition of my visual work, I think at the core of my practice, and the way I want to be alive in the world, is in community and in collaboration. And so it was really special to me to be able to inhabit the space with an opening that was in collaboration and community and also close the show in the same way.
It was a really meaningful show for me also because Marfa has been my home since the end of 2017. And I went through this whole moment of healing and rebuilding and building these pieces all in the time that I’ve been here. And so I’ve shown work like this elsewhere, but this was my first time showing it with a full series alone in Marfa.
These pieces are like windows into your healing experience, in kind of a literal way.
Yeah. And for me, a baseline of healing is also in dialogue with other people. And so that’s part of the collaborative element. I had a lot of people be like, oh, that was an interesting choice to bring so many people around a table. But for me, that is part of us being alive together. I can’t heal unless I’m in relation to other people and living things. We are always reflecting back and forth to one another. And so to me it felt less important to be alone in an empty space with people walking through and asking questions about the pieces. To me, it felt more interesting for this space to be an experiential space and people to have time to reflect within themselves.
It’s also interesting because that’s kind of how we figure out what things are and what our relationship to them is. There was an earthquake in Marfa a few months ago, and it was so strong that it shook the building I was in — it shook my desk. But I looked around me and everyone was acting like nothing happened. And so I thought, “Oh, that was in my head.” Then when I started getting texts with my friends, saying, “Did you feel that?” I went, “Oh, that actually happened.” I feel like that is sometimes how we figure out what’s real, what something is or what something isn’t, is in conversation with other people.
Totally. And then the wildcard is, throw in the word “not.” If you felt that and then everyone said, “No, that’s not what happened,” then you really have to trust something deep within yourself. It’s like we’re playing back and forth all the time with these concepts of what is and isn’t, and ultimately, what it comes down to is, at the core, with the object that’s floating in the center of the tension is the trust in naming that for yourself. The light falls on an object and it can trick your brain — you say, oh, did something just happen there? And you get to name what is and is not for yourself, and in dialogue with other people.
Sometimes people say “not” and then your spine straightens and you say, “But it is.” And what I kept going back to with the original thought of these Georgia O’Keeffe flowers is that she spent her whole career saying, “This is not sexual,” but her husband named them. Her husband was the first one to say they were vagina paintings — and that was taken with so much truth, because people were affected by them in that way. But I think about who in our society has more power to name and who does not. We have to trust our internal sense of what is and is not, and then we have to step outside ourselves and name that for ourselves and others, and vulnerably share what is and it’s not for us. And then there are these people whose truths sort of surpass our own at times, because society prioritizes those opinions more than others, possibly.
It’s an endless quandary of consideration. But it’s one that I think people walked into the space and walked out each with a different consideration.
And maybe when one person went in the light looked different than when another person went in. Actually, at your opening, the sun was setting gradually while the sound was playing, so the light was changing dramatically. By the time you read your essay, it was dark, and we couldn’t see the works, and we couldn’t see each other.
We were in complete darkness, which I didn’t think about — I knew it would get dark, but I didn’t realize how dark it would get. I also kind of thought it would be sparse, that people would just move through the space and then leave. Instead, it was a room full of people sitting and listening. And it was so dark, there was not really an opportunity to be distracted, which I was not trying to create. It just sort of happened. In that experience, from what I’ve been told, people were confronted with a lot of their own experience.
Back to “not,” I also wonder, what does it mean to define something by absence? To define something by “not”? Is there something kind of inherently combative about it? Inherently defensive? Or not always?
Yeah, not always. If language has emotions, then the words “no” and “not” is a position of setting a boundary or anger. But it’s also a refusal. And it’s interesting because if you come across a refusal or a “no,” then you have the option to accept that “no,” accept that “not” – or you greet it with naming what is. And so the show, by naming it “not,” is an invitation for you to name what it is. Which is challenging to do with these objects that are not paintings, but I’m naming them as paintings, right? They’re objects that sit on the wall as if they were paintings.
The word “not,” if it has an emotion, feels like a shutting down — but you’re reframing it as an invitation.
Yes. And that’s the other wild thing about the show is that for me, this was like a very joyful, playful, curious show. A lot of folks who came to the opening and also the closing reported experiencing that joy and also a depth to their own feelings, sitting with their own self. In the essay and in my recovery, when I’m saying “Oh, am I still dead?” and I’m being greeted with the repetition of “No, you are not” — there’s this space, right? There’s a space where you have an instance of hopeful relief. After “No, I am not,” there’s the vastness of curiosity of what is then, and what is then to come?
To me, delight, gratitude, playful curiosity — that is the only way to look through the window, so creating these floating, suspended windows of color and delight, and then extending an invitation, is the way we can expand our own definitions of what is on the other side of “not.” Because we get to choose, right? To name our realities for ourselves, to name our pieces for themselves. And so it was an invitation to find joyful, playful space with one another.
When I read your poem, I became fixated on the choice you made to put a blank space instead of putting the word “dead.” So the word “not” is repeated throughout the essay, but the actual word dead is an absence. Why was that a choice that you made?
For me, it felt distracting to the continual exploration I was trying to make with the piece. Dead so concretely means something to someone. But it means something to someone that it doesn’t mean to someone else. I can name that in a moment, I remember dying, and I was dead, and I consciously went through that. And the weight of that, for me, is not going to be the same as for the person reading. I wanted to keep it fluid and open and leave that blank space. Because really, you could fill in anything. Instead of it being “dead,” you could fill in “heartbroken,” you could fill in “abandoned,” you could fill in “stuck.” You could fill in that blank and still have the same experience of “Honey you are not.”
That level of loss or grief or earth-shattering dismantling of self that occurs when something big happens to you — it doesn’t really matter what it is. It affected you enough that you had to look at another person and ask, “Am I still?” And someone looks at you and says, “No, you’re not.” And where are you left then? To figure out what you are.