This piece has been a little bit of a struggle because so much happened between this exhibition closing and where I’m at right now, also editing panel discussion footage half deaf has been a huge pain, so I’ll just post my full reflections (with transcript!) later lmao. Sawry ya’ll
In my experience curating, I haven’t really had to do much in terms of exhibition programming. Typically, I would have an opening reception (with or without performances, which are a huge production to organize), maybe a workshop or a talk? or, if timing didn’t work out, a closing reception in place of or alongside an opening reception. Living Skin is a live-work space for its directors, which meant I couldn’t expect the space to be open and accessible to visitors, because they had their own programming in the space unrelated to my project that overlapped, and because it was also their home base, which brought up privacy concerns. The solution here was to do extensive programming to get people into the space, because yes the opening was on Valentine’s Day lol so some people had other plans 💅 but also there was programming at AHL Foundation that overlapped with a few of my events, and since they’re bestie, I needed to stay flexible schedule-wise to accommodate the overlap in our communities.
So we already talked about the opening in Part 1, and the next immediate public programming was Creative Coping, my arts-integrated trauma support group. I’ve been struggling to find a permanent home for this program, as it doesn’t make money (legally, it can’t), so while many of the art spaces I’ve talked to feel it’s an important program, none of them feel able to accommodate it, which sucks. I brought this up at Creative Coping with the members who came, but going forward, in future exhibition proposals, I would probably earmark space for this. I like the idea of having the group travel around to new spaces and new contexts, and in my experience, there’s something really peaceful for me doing a support group session in a space that I’ve curated, especially as a facilitator.
Since I changed my marketing strategy for Creative Coping to be more visually aligned with “my brand” (lol, cat memes I guess?) I think some people were under the impression the group would be more shit-posty than it was. Living Skin, and the exhibition itself, was really just a space to hold this program because I think it’s important, but it wasn’t intentionally related or unrelated. To give a run-down of how it goes, we start off with a check-in, limbic-system activating breathing, some arts-based free-associative exercises, and then we see where the conversation goes. A contact from one of the communities I bailed from came, which really caught me off guard in the moment, but because the group was smaller, we had an opportunity to address some of that stuff, and I walked away feeling a lot more resolved about some of the things that went down within the past year. Not very lulz or post-ironic of me, I know, but 100% a community facilitating strategy, and since the reason I even do curation is to build community, ultimately I didn’t feel it was misaligned. And hey, memes are a personal emotional expression, and later I’ll publish the talk I gave at CICA Museum as part of their Artteleported programming that goes into this topic more specifically.
To accommodate everyone’s schedule, I started organizing with the directors to schedule private curatorial walkthroughs outside of publicly listed programming, which gave me the opportunity to bring in new contacts and facilitate meetings between them, the artists, and the space directors, which was incredibly fulfilling for me. One of the most fulfilling meetings was with Jamie Kwon, a curator from Cooper Hewitt, whom I met through work, who had expressed an interest in meeting more contemporary Chinese artists in New York, because Cooper Hewitt’s collection is mostly historical, so she didn’t have as much opportunity to see newer works. Jamie, like me, is also a millennial, so the visual vernacular wasn’t totally foreign to her, and the walkthrough itself was us organically moving through the space and creating new connections between works and concepts. I also really enjoyed Jamie speaking on her own experience with the internet and its vernacular, and I was glad artist Xianglong Li was present to talk more in-depth about his and Tong Wang’s works, because they were of particular interest to Jamie.
This visit inspired the format for the public curatorial walkthrough, which was to move around the space in a similarly organic manner and just see how the conversation went. One of the first things I wanted to address was that, since we had different generational representation in the group, I wanted to reflect on everyone’s experience with the digital image, particularly the image online, and think about what it was we spent time looking at on the internet. I wanted involvement from the group because I wanted to see this more as a conversation than a lecture, and thankfully, Victoria Reshetnikov was there as a co-facilitator and Jerome, one of the Living Skin directors, was there to really challenge and propel the conversation forward, and in ways that were thoughtful and pleasantly unexpected.
I joke around a lot that I usually just go into things with a rough plan to stay flexible to whatever random changing conditions happen (aka rawdogging), but as I had already spent so much time with the artists, their works, and giving private curatorial walkthroughs before the public event, I knew more or less what I wanted to say about the works. The main goal, outside of forcing everyone to listen to me yap lmao, was to get feedback and commentary from the visitors and really activate the works through discussion. And give more of an opportunity for viewing for those who had missed the opening.
Like for the opening, I chose an outfit that was silly, memeable, and played into a sort of pastiche queer bimbo aesthetic wearing my bootleg Live, Laugh, Lesbian shirt, this goofy ass lime green jacket I got from the Delia’s collection of DollsKill, and of course, my silly little curator glasses. I also posted thirst-traps on my insta stories in an effort to have someone else try to coordinate the post-curatorial walkthrough drinks, which mostly manifested as
and I going for a few drinks at one of my fave local lesbian bars, the Bush, conveniently around the corner from Living Skin. Because, for real, the last place I wanted to be in that outfit was around a bunch of pretentious straight white men circle-jerking how cultured they were for hanging out at a sake bar instead of any number of pubs on the block. In Bushwick. Hard pass.
There were more private curatorial walkthroughs scheduled with friends and professional contacts, and every time it was an opportunity to really talk and connect with everyone about my practice and research, and also gauge the relationships for potential future collaborations (which have, so far, been incredibly fruitful). It was also a place and site to host meetings for informal studio visits with artists, especially when I was able to schedule open visiting hours, which took place when the space directors were out of town for other projects. I was still incredibly broken up about my recent break-up, and I spent a lot of time talking in that space with close friends, and chainsmoking outside, getting support that would prove seminal in my ability to start my own healing work with where I was at. My sad girl hours(tm) painting was more relevant than ever lol. And while I am a professional, I am also a person, and I was really struggling with a lot of converging issues at that point, and I wanted to be upfront about that, especially with my close contacts.
The last bit of public programming, which was followed by the closing reception, was a panel I had been tentatively discussing since the initial project proposal. My original plan was to incorporate a certain queer indie game developer as one of the panelists, alongside a roster of performance artists, avatar artists, and net-based artists, in topics specifically related to gender representation through the virtual (as it is a core area of my research and adjacent to the works in the exhibition). It made sense to me to include a game developer because a) I’ve curated art games before, and b) video games have a special place within new media, particularly how they explore- the relationship between the site of experience and the viewer/player (you also, quite literally, become your digital avatar, and that is always an interesting space for performance). That person bailed, and so I had to come up with a new strategy for how I was going to approach this, because it would also be the first panel discussion I’ve ever organized. I also lost another of the original artists I planned to have because we just couldn’t sync up due to life stuff. Shit happens *shrug emoji*
The panelists I ultimately included (about half of were in my original plan) were two of artists in the exhibition, Tong Wang and Ash Hagerstrand, and new media-integrated experimental drag performance artist (and bestie) Monica Rocha, alongside my co-moderator Avatar Lilith. Lilith and I had had some phone calls by this point and were exchanging texts for our citations, and had a formal meeting sitting down to decide the framework, which we then both worked on separately. This makes it sound way more meticulously planned than it was; in reality, I didn’t have the mental space to even begin planning it until probably a week and a half before, leaving a lot less prep time for the artists than they, and I, would have liked.
Hilariously, this panel discussion fell on the day after that Blood Worm Moon that had the astrology queers up in arms, but it was also the same night I got my period lmao. Strangely, I felt clearer and more awake that morning than I had in months, like I had just finally woken up from a dream I couldn’t escape from previously. When Lilith arrived, she was feeling similarly, and the conversation started almost immediately that morning and continued for the rest of the day throughout the event. We also both dressed in like slutty officewear (as did most of the panelists, by accident) and the moment of seeing that face-to-face was probably the most aligned I felt with another human being in my life. My mentor, Leeza Meksin, with whom I had been trying to reconnect, stopped by and was also part of the ongoing conversation, and friends who popped by for a minute also contributed; like all of these interactions were really just the separate points of a river finally converging, and it was both powerful and moving. The only time the conversation really stopped was during tech check, and one time during the panel when we had the change the battery on the video camera we were using for documentation lol.
Based on the originary text from the Office of Applied Strategy, and in consideration of the kinds of topics we wanted to broach that had also come up in all the discussions during and after our studio visit that reflect our holistic views towards our respective practices, our outline was as follows:
As I mentioned in my intro note, it’s gonna be a bit before the panel discussion is officially posted (still looking for a transcript baddie! hmu) But basically Lilith did a lot of the heavy lifting as a moderator, which I was a little sad about because her practice was incredibly relevant to our discussion, but it also made me reflect on how I spent too much time talking about my own practice when I wasn’t trying to center myself in the conversation. It was hard, though, because some of the questions were really specifically addressed towards me. So I learned a lot in terms of how I’d want to structure panel discussions going forward, and I also felt incredibly grateful I had someone so compatible and aligned with me as my collaborator on this. To Lilith- Thank you so much for your openness, kindness, honesty, and willingness to do this project with me, and I hope it is only the beginning of many beautiful, fruitful, and reflective collaborations in the future 💗💗💗
Also special shouout to Joe, S, and Soeun, who all either offered to help or helped with me exporting this documentation, I was having a real bitch of a time since I am for lack of the appropriate dongles.
Reflecting on this, especially now, I feel like there is a concrete push towards degrowth and a consumer movement towards dumb tech. I’ve had a lot of conversations between then and now about the soul-sucking slog of posting on social media, especially given the new terms of service that allow for harassment of fellow queers on most platforms. This is the mean reason I just stopped giving a fuck about what I’m posting; the fall of social media as we know it now will happen in a foreseeable future, and for all we know much of the data and content we’re currently generating may go the way of Myspace where we just lose basically everything. The panel ended with a discussion on the imperativeness of archiving digital data offline in the event such a future happens, and data hoarders and archivists alike are working overtime in this political administration to do exactly that. And also on the importance of AFK interactions and community-building that happens locally. A literal go outside and touch some grass type vibe. I’ve found that curating is the best method for me to facilitate those types of in-person connections and interactions because I get to get a bunch of people together concerned on similar ideas of theory, throw them in a room together with their friends, and force them to meet each other, which has been personally rewarding for me and a great way to extend past the limits of everyone’s social circles because I’m a bit of social nomad and not tied to any singular community.
Ugh finally. So okay I know I know, I need to get that panel discussion footage online (so sorry Lilith!) and that will probably be posted on Vimeo and then linked through here later with the transcript and some final reflections. In the meantime, this bitch of an article is finished and next big up is PAIKNAMJUNE’D 3 and hopefully some Electronic Archive in the meantime. Don’t hate me if shit is slow to update, pride month is here and as a gay ass bitch curator, I’m busy 💅💅💅 xoxo.