& i tell my students

& i tell my students:

it’s hard to make art

while you’re hiding

I was the Visiting Artist at BYU’s Art Department for the 2023-2024 academic year. As part of that position, they ask you to do a solo show in your last semester.

My work is often place-based. It is centered in listening to a place, and while being in place listening to what it surfaces in me and my body. And this show was no different. It came from that same process: of listening to a place and listening to what surfaced in me.

The show had the following components (all below):

1. show statement

2. interviews of current BYU queer students

3. participatory event with the queer BYU community

4. daily performance to share a part of my story

1. show statement

I know shame’s message well: all your belonging depends on hiding this part of you.

Shame, they say, is a social emotion. It culminates from this collective message: if you are this, you will not belong to us. Shame draws a perimeter around belonging by naming what identities are wanted, and not wanted.

As long as queerness is an unwanted identity—there will be shame. As long as queerness is an unwanted identity—there will be hiding, with all its attendant costs. As long as queerness is an unwanted identity—silence will be preferred.

And in that silence, shame ravels around queer bodies.

I know what silence feels like, to a queer body. I know what not wanting my queerness feels like. I know the weight of weighing speaking. I know what an interruption to silence feels like, to a queer body. I know what wanting my queerness feels like.

This is the work of unraveling shame: To participate in the speaking, with honesty. To participate in the hearing, with empathy.

May we assist in the unraveling, together.

1. interviews of current queer BYU students

The interviews with six current BYU students came through speakers in columns, which I built to match the architecture of the gallery. Viewers had to lean in, pressing their ears to the wood to hear/understand the voices.

Full audio of interviews with students, as shared from the columns.

3. participatory event with the queer BYU community

Before the show opened, members of the BYU queer community were invited to mark the walls of the gallery. White gallery paint was used on stamps, which read “What is lost when I am me” and “What is found when I am me.” Participants pressed the stamps into the wall, and were also invited to answer both of those questions in a temporary display, which was taken down and archived. Once the show opened, audio from the event was piped through speakers on either wall, to point to the presence of a community that is often invisible to many. The attending QR code showed viewers a time lapse and photos of the night.

4. daily performance to share a part of my story

At select times each day, I was present in the space to talk to viewers about the show and hear their life experiences. At those times, I also did a slide projector & audio performance that shared some of my story of reconciling with my queerness.