Projects
The Renaissance of the Renaissance
Body positive Instagram influencer Renee Cafaro organized a bevy of her cohort for The Renaissance of the Renaissance, which ended up on Buzzfeed. Featuring Asia Monet (@modelasiamonet), Sophie Turner (@sophieeturner), Jonna Capone (@curvy_capone), & Sarah Hamel-Smith (@TheCurvyTrini). Introducing Lorenzo Dinia as the dude. Art Direction: Renee Cafaro. Hair: Lizzy Weinberg.
Co-editor of indie press The Atlas Review with founding editor, poet Natalie Eilbert, 2016-19. Chapbooks as art objects featuring genius emerging writers, mostly poets. I did the visual bits while Natalie edited. In three years we made fourteen beautiful books together. One of them won its author a Whiting Award before her first full-length was even in the world. I love them all.
NSFW! Poet/activist petite Ami shot for luxe, arty print porn outfit Math Magazine. Again, this is porn. If you do not want to see flesh, do not click.
Video collaboration with poet Holiday Black for the San Francisco Film & Arts Festival. Holiday's poem uses found language from Aileen Wournos' personal letters.
Video collaboration with poet Holiday Black co-starring a paper man named Brad. Newhive says it's "a bold, creepy & radically joyful take down of patriarchy. It’s pretty on the surface but brash & loud beneath the paper trail of Brad... This video is glitter & guts." BRAD premiered at A.I.R. Gallery.
One May 1st I invited NYC to make a picture with some sky in it for a crowd-sourced quasi-cubist record of light throughout the city at the same moment.
Portraits of women artists staged in installations that once filmed read flat. The only thing dimensional is flesh.
For a year award-winning novelist Manuel Gonzales wrote a story every Friday based on one of my photos. Once a month a guest pair played a hand. After a year we brought songwriters into the mix for a sort of multimedia Möbius strip: a picture of a songwriter; then a story about that picture; a song based on the story; a picture based on the song; another story about that picture.
With Edina S, featuring Nancy Randall. MUA: Masha Gvozdov, Dawn Campbell. Photo series of women's head covers from various cultures, religious & secular. Most were styled from the same two scarves, one black, one white.
ASSISTS:
In collaboration with Artbook at MoMA PS1, Monica McClure and Laura Marie Marciano launched LAMM, their multidisciplinary, experiential poetry event, featuring the work of Camonghne Felix, Women's History Museum, Bunny Michael, Zoie Omega, & Emily Raw.
Paper set pieces, costumes, & props for Claire Keichel's LULU IS HUNGRY at Ars Nova. Directed by Phillip Gates, featuring Emma Meltzer, Ryan Feyk, Chinaza Uche, Julia Frey, Sam Gonzalez, Emily Marro, Krystal Seti, & Jeremy O. Harris.
For Monica McClure's full-length debut Tender Data I concocted a cipher from glyphs she drew for the book's first poem & made multimedia text art in that secret language for visual passages spaced throughout the volume.
Poet/performance artist Kate Durbin devised a new form of passive-aggressive performance art inspired by surveillance culture, the teen girl tumblr aesthetic, & Vanessa Beecroft, reveling in teen narcissism & the girl gaze. In a public space a group of female performers take selfies for an hour straight. They do not directly interact with the audience, only with their phones. Passersby gawk, analyze, & take selfies of their own with the artists. All selfies are uploaded to social media and shared in real time. #helloselfienyc took over Union Square at rush hour.
Anti-Surveillance Feminist Poet Hair & Makeup Party
Oakland poet Stephanie Young created the Anti-Surveillance Feminist Poet Hair & Makeup Party project in reaction to an internal debate within American poetry after the December 2013 publication in the New York Daily News of a puff piece profiling six young female New York poets. Photographed at the NYC Poetry Festival on Governors Island in late July when the New York poets were dressed to perform in the scorching heat, the article was widely excoriated within the poetry subculture. The poets came to be blamed for having dared subject themselves to the male gaze in public. The backlash was vicious.
The Anti-Surveillance Feminist Poet Hair & Makeup Party aimed to scramble the gaze. The Brooklyn segment was organized by poet Monica McClure, whose image headed the Daily News article & who therefore became the locus of her colleagues' vitriol. Adopting the techniques of CV Dazzle by Adam Harvey, the Party thwarts the machine gaze of facial recognition software & disrupts the male gaze of the dominant culture. All via traditional femme grooming rituals & female bonding.
Organized by Emily Gallagher of the Tenement Museum & NAG (Neighbors Allied for Good Growth), the Brooklyn Diggers, a collective of artists, activists & historians striving to reclaim the psychogeography of Brooklyn neighborhoods, recreated 1861 for a one-day festival in Greenpoint's McGorlick Park. The event included a mini-museum, period music by a live band, smell boxes, nautical knot tying instruction, Civil War era food to sample, a scale model of the U.S.S. Monitor, which was built in Greenpoint in 1861, & my contribution: an outdoor (digital) daguerreotype studio with easy-on 1860s costumes.