Entwined Intimacies

This installation celebrated the various relationships developed among the beings sharing the apartment I lived in. I explored the constant subtle labor of living with someone through a video piece titled Sofa So Good in which my flatmate and I carry a couch from our apartment to my studio in preparation for the exhibition. This work was shown on a tv screen viewable from the couch the very couch in question.

Thinking about processes of consumption, digestion, and decomposition, I saved a year’s worth of kitchen scraps in a vermicomposting system and presented this compost in the gallery. During the opening, this was activated as a performance in which I was buried entirely in the compost for several hours.

The yeasts and other bacteria of the apartment were present in sourdough bread served at the opening and also in a floor piece consisting of my sheets, covered in bread dough and my pillow case, covered kombucha scoby.

Finally, to honor my flatmate's cat and once again thinking about durational labor and dynamics of pet/pet-owner relationships, I created a video work in which I followed my flatmate's cat, Ozymandias, King of Kings, around our apartment for the duration of my phone's battery, approximately 5 hours.

Overall, I tried to use long durational work to present subtle, ongoing dynamics of living with others. Isolating those relationships, taking them out of the rational stream of everyday life and placing them in acts of bizarre and overextended intimacy framed the relationships, giving them a weight that it can be hard to feel in the flow of everyday life.