Can you provide some background about the text works that are featured alongside the pieces at Lyles and King? Do you see them as extensions of the works? Or a separate but related poetry/prose?
Everything in my work is a kind of collage element—objects, imagery, stories, sounds, research. Language has always been a central collage element. It used to be my own, and then I got too traumatized to produce new language. The language in White Male Ally comes from various sources: Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea; the physical book from Clarice Lispector; Anne Carson writing on Rome and wolves; Anne Dufourmantelle writing on risk; and Lisa Robertson, whose book Magenta Soul Whip (in which she writes, sometimes in Latin, through history, empire, eros, and everything around and in between) is pictured in Exorcism Vessels.
In my process of assembling materials, my aim has been to work more intuitively than didactically—privileging the erotics over the hermeneutics, as Sontag once advocated.
In this show I brought in texts that evoke strong emotions and memories in me, and that express or reflect or refract what I am not able to articulate. The texts are not extensions of the works, rather integral infrastructure of the works.
