Project Type: Wofford

Motel Cucaracha

2004
installation, video, performance, drawing

An installation centered on three lonely, miserable cockroach hotel guests, isolated in their rooms. The Motel presented alienation and transformation through the eyes of nature’s most reviled and most indomitable creature, raising questions about cultural difference and emotional alienation via absurdist tragicomedy.

Visitors entered the motel-room-like-installation which doubled as the set for a video piece involving all 3 cockroaches. The video played on the TV within the room, creating an endless cycle of despair. Outside the room were a row of hand-made doorknob hangers with plaintive, existential lamentations in lieu of typical housekeeping phrases.

A series of late-night winter salons, Les Nuits des Cafards, were hosted by one of the three Motel cockroaches. Every guest at Les Nuits was granted a membership to the elite, shadowy La Société Des Cafards organization.

Woffords, Paint

2007
painting, video

Sibling rivalry at its finest, in the midst of western modernist fantasies of Eden, and tropical fantasias in general. The Wofford sisters execute a large tropical-primitive double self-portrait, and wind up consuming the paint as the painting completes itself. The video and painting are exhibited side-by-side.

Portable Toilets of the Western World

2009-ongoing
photographs, web project, book project

Portable toilets appear, like divine visions, in some extraordinary venues around the world. In these end-days of Western civilization, their presence at sites of fallen empire, decaying faith and hapless urbanity consistently evokes a desperate, poignant, portentous beauty.

Nurse

2006-07
drawings, video

Moving the image of the Filipina nurse into something deeper and stranger: multiple narratives of gender, subservience, power, care-giving, and immigration inform this project.

The drawings are on simple green paper to suggest a standardized institutional quality. The nurses’ uniforms are heightened with white ink, rendering them otherwise invisible beyond their professional function. The nurses are situated in vague, liminal spaces, and often interact with a dough-y “goo” which functions as both flesh and border.

The videos are simple tableaux, with the nurses improvising their own narratives. A consistent, if goofy series of transgressions move them outside of pious service and into a more absurdist, rebellious place: how women might entertain themselves off-duty, horsing around, being “bad”.

CPV

2013-on
painting/collage
ink, acrylic and masking tape on canvas and paper

Recent and ongoing series of paintings, drawings and small studies in honor of the late Carlos Pedro Villa, San Francisco artist, professor and mentor.