Paradox in Language: What I look at is never what I wish to see is written in context with a group exhibition curated at the University Art Gallery, featuring the work of Charles Gaines, Benjamin Verhoeven and Erika Vogt. This project investigates the influences of various strains of conceptual thought that began to take form in the early 1960s when the influences of Structuralism, including the theories and methodologies of Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, became increasingly important to visual analysis including the many forms of conceptualism from the 1960s to present. These three artists form a constellation of varying practices that consider the aesthetic strategies of Conceptualism and Structuralism and the challenges that lie in the pursuit of pictorial representation. Paradoxically, language is both inside and outside meaning.

Charles Gaines' (b.1944, U.S.) invents a set of rules for randomizing appropriated texts which he then draws out onto paper. Through this undoing of language, the meaning of the original text is reconstructed allowing a space for the viewer's interpretation to enter. This relationship between the text as image and image as text poses the question: When language is present, what is absent? Benjamin Verhoeven (b.1990, Belgium) appropriates scenes from films such as Antonioni's Blow-Up in his series Scanning Cinema. These films are re-interpreted by scanning them in real time, creating a distorted echo of the original. Influenced by early experimental and Structuralist films, Erika Vogt (b. 1973, U.S.) creates installations that include video, drawings, and sculptures. Nonlinear logic and abstract concepts are characteristic of Vogt's practice which is grounded in both experience and process.

This study examines how ruination functions allegorically in the work of Kevin Jerome Everson and Michelle Dizon. I argue that ruination in each of their practices must be understood as instances of pathological melancholia and as such their work yields insights into current challenges to multicultural solidarity. This study is also developed in conjunction with the exhibition Restless Debris, which focuses on class and racial politics attendant to ruin imagery in post-recession installation art between 2012 and 2014. This study is thus intended to advance the current discourse on the relationship between narratives of national decline, multicultural politics, and contemporary figurations of ruins in popular culture.

1 - Where we are

Are you bored of the monotony of life in your climate bunker? Would you rather be learning underwater basket weaving than taking your next meeting? Are you tired of growing anonymous shareholder value while living with a target on your back? It might be time to divest.

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I’m so tired of watching palestinian families beg for their lives over instagram. What is it worth if I donate $20 here and there to feed someone when they won’t let food into the gaza strip? I wonder which tactics gain the most support as I “like” the videos and quickly scroll past—the explanation of learning english just to ask, the apologies for asking, the children waving, the crying mothers, the sweating fathers, the videos of flooding tents, the hollow cheeks, the handsome men, the rubble, the voices telling me allah will never forgive me, telling me to skip because it doesn’t matter anyway. For a while I started saving every video I came across. I imagined that I might create a dark room full of speakers where they all begged for their lives at once so we could all suffer together. The algorithm started to reward me with more agony, more desperate pleas. And so I stopped saving them, and I never made a dark room to play the prayers. Maybe my soul is the dark room.

I prefer dark rooms. Most gallery spaces flooded with bright light are physically uncomfortable for me to inhabit—an artificial daylight more oppressive than the sun. This light clearly sustains no biological life, but culture dies here too. The culture illuminated by the cool harsh fluorescence of our arts institutions is often inaccessible. The term “high art” brings to mind something cold, abstract, and colorless—removed from the cultural lives of the broader public as if to say, “it’s better because you don’t understand it.” Perhaps AI slop art is the overcorrection to this affliction. I cringe at colorful morphing dragons created by the quick keystrokes of some dude whose artistry relies on wasting water to cool down computers processing every etsy artist into a cannibalized blaze of psychedelic glory. I’m also highly critical of a world where art requires conceptual justification to be deemed worthy of its expression. Neither of these extremes are very soulful, whatever that means.

My experience with art academia has taught me that craft isn’t “real” art. Arts institutions will denounce usefulness in art and in the same breath tout decolonial theory—a contradiction exemplified by stolen art objects intended for embodied ceremonial use flattened by their display in a glass vitrine. Apparently the old english “craeft” is nearly untranslatable now, signifying more than just a knowledge of making, but a knowledge of being. This ancient word holds nuance stripped away in a post-enlightened world of mind over matter. I find inspiration from forward thinkers like David Graeber who describes how enlightenment thought itself is a flattened version of indigenous frameworks. Inspired by interactions with north americans like the wendat leader Kondiaronk, early europeans responded to criticism of enforced hierarchies with theoretical freedoms instead of building in liberatory frameworks that would require continuous justification of authority. This history lesson becomes the basis for a book filled with complexity, asking us to consider that human progress may not be linear by providing examples of cultures that held societal structures outside of our spiritually destitute status quo.

I recently learned of the ojibwa word for the soullessness of western culture: wetiko. Wetiko, whose origins may come from the phrase “ween dagoh” meaning "solely for oneself”, is a word that describes a mind-virus that feeds off of the insatiable greed of the ego, whose most notable symptom is that of an “icy heart.” According to a book on this phenomenon by Paul Levy, nobody is immune to the disease regardless of race, sex, or nationality. I’m reminded of a post by @satrayreads that states, “nobody’s perfect / bell hooks was a landlord.” Despite obvious examples of people with marginalized identities perpetuating harm (see: ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield vetoing international calls for an Israeli ceasefire) and robust frameworks like “intersectionality” to describe complex axes of privilege, progressive circles are rife with reactivity and black-and-white thinking. I believe it’s probably how shut down we are in response to the cruelty of congolese slave-labour, cop-city expansions, and endless ICE detention that allows for petty outbursts to break apart communities with good intentions. Or maybe it’s just CIA psyops.

Whatever the cause, our fractures are more obvious than ever. These fissures are being exploited by billionaires who have stolen trillions of dollars from us, facilitated most recently by the policies of Donald Trump. The day of Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, a scale that I constructed fell, bent, and broke apart. The scale was formed by two precariously propped copper cut outs. The moment it shattered was symbolic perfection. Any significant weight would have broken the scale whose purpose was more symbolic than functional. It was not justice that had fallen, but the illusion—a false metric. Inscribed on the inside of one of the copper faces are the words “pleasure is purpose,” a guiding principle revealed in the destruction. By contrast the Zuckerberg-coined silicon valley motto, “move fast and break things,” seems to be the guiding principle of this presidential administration, which has been hell-bent on dismantling any remaining illusion of democracy in the US as quickly as possible. It’s probably no coincidence that Zuckerburg himself was one of several tech billionaires lined up to usher in Trump’s second-coming.

In response to the horrors of this technofascist power grab, I have fantasized about billionaires being freed of their karmic baggage by flying to a private island where they would focus on soul retrieval, drink juice, and leave us the hell alone. In telling my friend about it, we laughed as we imagined an infomercial that would trick them into self-incarcerating by selling their souls back to them at the cost of their former lives. To differentiate from the well known 12-steps, I mused that the program would mimic the psychic cycle of the 12 astrological houses, starting at the 1st house: the self. The 1st house is ruled by the planet mars, who mythologically speaking is the god of war. Of all the planets to colonize, I find mars to be an interesting choice for billionaires to focus on. For example, why not build cloud cities on venus, the planet of love and beauty? Or inhabit the moon—it’s far closer. This line of thinking quickly leads me to a more obvious question: If we believe we have the power to turn mars into a planet habitable by humans, then why don’t we believe in our already habitable planet as a haven for humanity? More simply—why turn a dead planet into a living one, when we are taking our living planet and killing it?

By all apparent metrics, the powerful men most responsible for climate collapse are not interested in living—least of all in the biological sense. To acknowledge the fantastic fragility of the body would be to admit their own mortality, a fact incompatible with their delusions of god-like power. For this small minority of billionaire technocrats, power comes with no responsibility. One can only imagine the amount of energy expended in the expansion of empire—the expulsion of explosive junk into the atmosphere, or worse, weapons wielded towards the desecration of holy sites here. The reality of their warmongering is diametrically opposed to the idea of stewardship and the ongoing practices of indigenous land keeping that have been widely cited to account for 80% of the planet’s biodiversity. This figure is probably inaccurate as it’s impossible to quantify, but it speaks to a broader truth about pre-colonial cultures that still see life as interconnected and sacred.

“None of them believe in this planet,” Naomi Klein said of these “would-be space colonizers”, who are “putting their hopes in some other place than this beautiful sacred space.” She describes the apocalypticism of these powerful men, a secularized version of the literal biblical end-times that drives them to colonize mars, torch our remaining resources, and build gilded bunkers before committing to this world. In his book “Survival of the Richest,” Douglas Rushkoff describes a meeting he took with 5 ultra-wealthy men who interrogated the theorist on ways to personally prepare for an extinction-level climate event. Specifically, they mentioned their fears around stockpile security and their concerns about controlling would-be guards who could no longer be convinced by currency in the face of a societal collapse. The billionaires were apparently more interested in using shock collars than Rushkoff’s suggestion that they build solidarity with their staff by treating them like friends.

If anybody is afflicted with the icy heart of wetiko it’s clearly these guys. While most people I speak to are disturbed by my empathy for billionaires, my view of them as suffering from a sickness is actually a strategic framework. If we are to bridge our separateness and build broad coalitions that could hold these men accountable, we’ll need to see empathy as power. This kind of work will require that each of us first tend to the petty tyrants housed in our own hearts. Of course the harm we’ve perpetrated as non-billionaires will be far less heavy to hold than the impossibly intensive work required by billionaires. Within this framework, we are already individually so much more powerful than these fragile men. At least this is the story I tell myself. A new story is just what we need according to Naomi Klein. She claims that there is “a story that needs to be woven that is really about committing to this world … it’s a multi-racial, multi-generational, multi-faith story that also is about liberating all of our spiritual practices from the state projects that have perverted and destroyed them.”

I watched Klein repeat this on instagram,the same platform on which a post by @turekbooks tells us that the lakota word for child translates to “sacred being” and that any nation that bombs and starves children is spiritually destitute. I tend to agree. My hours of daily screen time on instagram contribute heavily to my conceptual frameworks these days. I collect screenshots and repost them in carousel slideshows set to music, cataloging my thinking in a public archive owned by a private corporation. In a “Little Red Book” published by said corporation in 2013, two pages are reserved for the all capital quote, “REMEMBER, PEOPLE DON’T USE FACEBOOK BECAUSE THEY LIKE US. THEY USE IT BECAUSE THEY LIKE THEIR FRIENDS.” If liking Mark Zuckerberg was a prerequisite for using meta, I imagine it would have never existed. The social media manifesto is filled with quotes about the power of human connection and helping the most people possible, which would be inspiring if the company had spent the next decade facilitating networks of fluid exchange instead of selling our attention to the highest bidder.

Despite being problematic, I feel compelled to participate in social networks. After all, I like my friends. It’s also easy for me to separate the psychological manipulations of these mad men from the mere facilitation of virtual human connection. What’s troubling isn’t the cloud technology itself, but the questions of ownership and access to information—a perennial problem. These days the search results we see on google are determined by ad spend, and posts by our friends are far outweighed by algorithmic advertisements. Nonetheless, I find something inspiring about memes—something democratic about how these units of culture spread like mycelial hyphae and shape our collective thinking. Memes rely on impeccably simple framing instead of individual genius. I see memes as another form of folk art—art that exists outside the traditional modes of authorship like the striking beauty of quilts made by the women at gee’s bend, or the collective practice of Maria Martinez.

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You too could join the growing community of once disillusionedexecutives who have found salvation in Sea World's 12-house divestment plan, and start your path towards soul rehabilitation today.

0 - Starting Over

If you’re a sentimental guy, but you’ve kept it locked insidemaking money’s got you feeling like a stone there’s a place where you can go— where the crystal waters flow— and a man like you can come into his own… ~*~SEA WORLD~*~ #`-~spiral til’ you’re free”;’”

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Enter Sea World. Sea World, not to be confused with “SeaWorld” (or as the video calls it “fish zoo”), is a speculative fiction—a stateless, classless society with the sea at the center. It’s a spatial-temporal reframing inspired by In The Wake by Christina Sharpe, the emerging field of blue humanities which seeks to reclaim the sea from the margins of an academic vision, and seattle aquarium’s spilhaus projection, an open-source map of “the world ocean as it is: one big, contiguous body of seawater.” Remapping around the largely invisible space of the sea is meant to be radically inclusive and emphasize our interconnectedness. So is the shift towards “moon time”. While our dominant clocks and calendars are based on the sun’s daily and yearly cycles, as carved out by colonizers in the name of control, Sea World tells time primarily by the cycles of the moon.

A cosmic consideration: men’s hormone cycles match up with a 24 hour sun cycle, while women follow a 28 day lunar cycle. Morning wood and monthly periods follow this logic. In the dance of dark and light lives a paradox: men’s bodies are adaptive amidst hormonal consistency, while women’s bodies are holding amidst hormonal fluctuation. Men start over small daily, while women start over big monthly. On moon time, you feel the tides. In a time of broader collapsing structures, I think we could collectively learn a thing or two from women about cycles and starting over. While the west broadly perceives any attention paid to the moon as pseudoscience, it’s just gravity. Why don’t we trust in the moon’s tidal pull on us? After all, we’re 70% water. So is Sea World. Even Elon Musk recently joked about calling our planet “water” instead of “earth”.

It’s an interesting phenomenon that many of my ideas and interests are shared by the billionaire class. Astrology is a notable example. It’s probably because I’m also obsessed with power. In my case, I wouldn’t want to wield it—I understand that there is always a price to pay. In contrast, JP Morgan (of you know) once famously said, “millionaires don't need astrologers; billionaires do.” It’s a quote that speaks to the power of mapping planetary movements and timing decisions based on the patterns they create. Skeptics who aren’t put off by the “irrationality” of these large scale dynamics may instead be wary of the manipulative potential of planetary symbols—it’s true they’ve been used to justify nazism. But the stars have been used to navigate time and space for millennia, and every ancient culture would have noted the planets as wandering ones spiralling across the night sky. Planetary mythology is universal and cross cultural, found in sub-saharan african stories and aztec cosmology alike. According to one scholar, the origins of language itself may be traced back to the twelve constellations.

Astrology is simply an excellent way to tell time. Despite this sounding wacky, it’s something we all unconsciously agree on, as an orbit around the sun is how we mark years and a rotation marked by the sun is how we measure days. Every birthday is a celebration of the sun’s return to the position it was in the day you arrived on earth. Even the days of the week are named after the planets—sunday, mo(o)nday, satur(n)day, etc. Old almanacs told us practical information on how the stars related to our bodies, a map of the stars from head to toe. Ram head, bull throat, twin arms, crab chest, lion heart, maiden belly, scale hips, scorpion privates, archer thighs, goat knees, pitcher calves, fish feet—astrology is a system that maps the bodies’ time. You arrive head first, gravity works overtime on your feet. Weird fishes are wise.

Pluto, the slowest wandering star, is stationed direct in aquarius for the first time in 225 years. Aquarius is embodied by a person fetching water for the group—the sign of the collective. Pluto is said to be the planet of power, death, and transformation. Following its eccentric orbit tracks cycles of power transformed as if by divine intervention. According to John Christopher, “in the case of Aquarius, that higher power is the power of the people united under a new contract for a more equal and just world. It’s hard to believe that a society can go from a period of collective gaslighting to a new age of enlightenment and rational thinking but that is precisely what has occurred throughout history each time Pluto has entered the sign of Aquarius.” He goes on to chart the last cycle of pluto in aquarius which corresponds with the french, american and haitian revolutions, and the one before that which corresponds to Henry VIII’s challenge to catholicism and the fall of the incan empire.

In some beautiful math, when you add the houses, represented by the numbers 1 + 2 + 3 … + 11 + 12, you get 78, which is coincidentally the number of cards in a tarot deck and roughly a contemporary human life span. While there are 12 cycles that divide the sun’s rotation, the moon’s orbit is closer to 13 cycles per year. I like to think of these as numbered 1-12 with an extra moment to pause on the concept of zero. In tarot, zero is the fool. In the Smith illustration, it’s a man on the edge of a cliff, ready to dive down because he’s naively looking up. Resurrection—the embodiment of starting over—is always a fool’s errand. When the seasons in Sea World start over, it’s marked by fool’s day, an ode to the pre-gregorian julian calendar. From my perspective, it makes more sense to start the year in spring on a cardinal sign like aries. You ram headfirst into life like a fool—when the heat of spring arrives it’s performatively posturing like mars ready for war. In Sea World’s 12-house life calendar, your first year of life, 0 - 1, is the 1st house which is ruled by mars. So is aries, first sign of the ego. If ram head is defensive, it’sonly the math of defining a self—in so doing we name an other. Perhaps that’s why our 1st year—0—is foolish, foolish to be born thinking that you are separate from everything else.

By the time you enter your final houses, ruled by the outer planets, 11: 55 - 66, followed by 12: 66 - 78 you have a better sense of your connectedness—this is no time for war. The final houses lead to the dreamy disillusionment of winter, mapped by the cool climb of capricorn, followed by the stubborn airy reason of aquarius, culminating in the spiritual slip sliding haze of pisces. While some people argue about whether astrology is believable because of discrepancies among systems of measurement, it doesn’t really matter where the symbols start and end—what’s important are the relationships—what harmonizes, and what clashes. According to John Christopher’s website, astrology is a “higher form of music theory.” In that it’s a 12-key scale whose frequencies spiral forward in circles, sure. It’s a perspective that is as “far out” as the outer planets and the idiosyncratic signs that they rule.

I’ve also been told I’m idiosyncratic. The other day I broke my favorite pen in half while talking to an insurance agent on the phone. These days I spend hours a month on hold with insurance fighting for coverage that was promised in theory and denied in practice. In my constellation of psychological symptoms, persistence is a sincere struggle in perfunctory practical matters. Why wouldn’t be in a world that makes so little sense? In searching for the meaning of the madness in our medical system, the only reasonable conclusion I’ve drawn is that the point is punishment. It’s always an uphill battle to access treatment for physical symptoms because the body is somehow considered the least credible agent in a system of inverted authority. The person experiencing pain holds all of the responsibility and none of the power to determine their path forward. The physician stands between the patient and their medication instead of acting as an expert who is consulting on options. The prescription is then submitted to the pinnacle of power with no responsibility—the “hands” of the insurance. I’m pretty sure that whatever proxy denies my “claims” doesn’t even have hands.

Hands are notoriously hard to represent—it’s a truth learned in time by anyone who has attempted figure-drawing. Drawing hands is a hard-earned skill, something that slowly enters your body through quiet observation and repetition—I know because I practiced for years. It’s a funny truth that the markings in ancient caves capture the striking likeness of human hands better than any AI model could. There’s something poetic to be said here for the power of simplicity and the uselessness of advanced technology in matters that require no mediation. Alone in my studio, after I accidentally spilled a bottle of pre-mixed pottery glaze on the floor, I found purpose in the pleasure of running my hands through the wet mess, something I would have missed if I had rushed to complete the task of cleanup. On a bisqued ceramic bowl I had once thrown for a painting professor (who has not emailed me back since I told him I was transitioning) I printed my glaze-globbed hand in the spiraling middle as if to say: “I know I’m not allowed to exist, but I do.”

The objects in Living Room that aren’t an indexical mark of my hand were made with my hands or picked up on a path I frequent, chosen for their functional craftsmanship. Each of the lamps is a ceramic and steel sculpture, an esoteric symbol mirroring one of the planets in our solar system. The only lamp in the exhibition I didn’t assemble is mars. Mars is an exposed bulb hanging from a curved wooden neck weighed down by a single concrete brick. I kept the lamp because I liked the channel carved in the wood for the cord to rest and the cozy red woven sheath to cover it. The lamp was found outside of the office of art professor Simon Penny, who shares in my compulsion to keep things. In a paper he wrote regarding personal responsibility amidst climate collapse, Penny recounted a friend suggesting that he create junk-art using the discarded items he had begrudgingly adopted. He responded that this, “was not possible because nothing is ‘junk’.”

It’s a funny counterpoint to Noah Purifoy’s response to critics of his practice with, “fine, that’s junk.” On Purifoy’s self-proclaimed junk-art, Ismail Muhammed writes, “what his quip points to is a complete lack of interest in the society that has rendered certain people and things disposable.” Perhaps this complete lack of interest is what drove Noah Purifoy to create assemblages in the desert for the last 15 years of his life. I have my own fantasies of escaping the bright white walls of the art world and the overpriced dilapidated tinderbox I call my apartment. I dream of my own institution in the desert, digging holes to usher in an oasis, building domes that will withstand the earthquakes, fires and floods that are no doubt coming for california. It’s a potential move inspired by both hope for a sustainable future and bitter cynicism about the state of things. If we were to map out a path connecting Penny’s commitment to usefulness and Purifoy’s rejection of it, I fear I fall somewhere between, flitting back and forth. It’s clear that this kind of ambiguity is unsettling to people. Perhaps it’s because in-betweenness reveals something unfixed, a fracture that will widen and fall apart.

My life fell apart in 2022 when my identity was set free from its fixed position. Following a long suppressed feeling that I was a man, an “irrational” idea disputed by everyone around me, including multiple “experts” on gender identity who acted as gatekeepers to care I’d already denied myself for a decade. I found a surgeon that took cash to cut off the breasts I never wanted and started taking testosterone with the help of the nurses at the aids project los angeles who didn’t think to question me. It probably saved my life. It’s also the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done—becoming a man at 31. While my relationship to my self has drastically improved, my relationship to everything else has proven more difficult. It turns out it’s true—men are lonelier. Plus, I’ve been saddled with the burden of proof in convincing every life-affirming agency that I, Alystair Stella Rogers, might exist.

I might not exist for long. I relate to the orchid that bakes next to an incandescent bulb, its life tested by the cruel conditions of the CAC gallery. While the plant looks lively compared to the stark white walls and the weighed down patch of dead wheatgrass to its left, it lives inside quite the cursed object. I bought the gilded president mug that houses it during a trip to Washington DC with my parents because of the haunting quality it possessed. The trip took place during Trump’s first term, when I was staunchly opposed to my parents on the blue / red divide, a divide literally and figuratively represented in stars and stripes ceramic. The mug is ironically made in China by a corporation called AMERIKA!. This object symbolically foretold our fast track to fascism, featuring portraits of every US president ending with the text, “Donald Trump / 2017 - .” If the mug is a premonition, then tending to the orchid that has lived inside ever since is a performance. Caring for my six-year-old orchid and staging the video installation are both meant to be curative—I hope that the simple act of sustaining life will disrupt the discursive formation of hostile containment.

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~~~~SEA WORLD the sovereign state *not* to be confused with the former corporation fish zoo

Beyond the Binary - Embodiment

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Hi, you’ve reached Sea World!

Your soul awaits — press 1 to access your free 12-house divestment plan

_____________We’re sorry / / /

All our attendants are busy redeeming an other … to access salvation look within!

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I have a very smart and progressive friend who “had to admit” that Elon Musk had at the very least succeeded in popularizing electric vehicles. I was horrified. Even if I were to get past the fact that Musk is a literal nazi, relies on hoards of child slave miners, and stole credit for tesla—I don’t think electric cars should be celebrated. To me, any investment in electric cars is enabling the waste of car culture—the inefficiency and isolation of sitting in traffic, the paving over wildflowers for these deadly dumb vehicles to sit, and in so doing delaying any divestment towards collective transportation infrastructure. But arguing for or against electric cars isn’t the point, and anyone who has been trapped in a meaningless back and forth fight knows how seductive a faulty framework can be. Our media and the inane provocations that float around to inspire these kinds of binaristic fault lines are great at stealing our attention away from what matters—living.

I think about the theatrical “filibuster” of Cory Booker, who recently held up congress by speaking passionately against Trump for many hours without once mentioning palestine. While it’s clear that he was paid a high price not to, it begs the question: what’s it worth standing for anything if you can’t stand against the mass starvation and killing of children? While I find the political right’s claim to care about children a laughable attempt at control, even in the most progressive states petitions are met with silence when we ask our senators to block the transfer of tax dollars that will be used to buy and ship guns in service of sniping starving children. I saw a post today of a boney baby on the brink of death—he won’t be a fool for long. The text over the image read, “How are you being silent when babies are being forcibly starved?” I want to grab Zucks by the neck through the instagram app and scream in his face, “And why are you starving them? And why are you making me watch?”

And why am I still watching?

There’s this meme I saw that reads, “types of atoms in the universe / helium 25% / hydrogen 74% / other 1%.” Framing this red and blue pie chart is a black background with white text provided by @Katyscartoons who comments, “Atoms are binary. They are either intended to be hydrogen or helium. We can’t just scrap this worldview just because of a handful of exceptions.” Katy is referring, of course, to trans people as the exception, and to the gender binary as the worldview, as enforced by a number of new executive orders targeting access to legal documentation and healthcare in the US. I’m implicated in the other 1% as a trans man, but am also privileged in being a relatively wealthy white one. My intersection of identities happens to be the site of the current culture war where rich white men distract us with outrage over the confusing contradiction of trans bodies. We keep our heads down, anesthetizing ourselves with SSRIs to carry on doom scrolling, arguing online about our right to rights, while they steal everything we have left to lose.

Leaving nothing left to lose is dangerous business. In giving the yemeni people nothing to lose, they defend palestine every time, dutifully delaying the genocide of the people in gaza despite us diligently raining fire on their land. Our tax dollars are more likely to fund murder than healthcare, so why are we still paying them? We might start to ask ourselves if it would be better for things to fall apart. At my thesis opening, a stranger fell when a chair that was loosely tacked together with scrap metal and screws collapsed under his weight. In honor of the incident I named the chair chiron after the minor asteroid that is mythologized as the wounded healer. During my poor guest’s unsuspecting fall, the chair opposite was an empty sturdy sibling to the one in disrepair. The chair was found the same week in front of the same house—a 2nd iteration of the conditions in which it was formed. In my parents’ case they only had one child, so I imagine other timelines where I am the sturdy chair who never fell apart watching, or falling apart while watched by an unburdened twin. I suspect if I had to choose, I’d rather be the wounded healer. Wounded healer is coincidentally what Paul Levy, the reformed economist who writes about wetiko, calls himself.

In the most redemptive tv I’ve seen lately, a short documentary follows a group of men serving maximum security sentences who find purpose in the pleasure of making quilts for nearby foster kids as gifts for their solar returns (birthdays). These men don’t see empathy as a weakness—they are down to do the dirty work of metaphorical death. One of the men who goes by Chill tells us about how each person in the sewing room has their own unique style—his quilting is less planned and precise than the others’ and embraces the mess of transformation by focusing on his favorite symbol: butterflies. I too find comfort in the symbol of butterflies as courageous and resilient. Of course, even the most innocuous seeming symbol can be hijacked in the name of evil. TIME reported that “Using a variety of mixed metaphors, Yarvin advocates for a “Butterfly Revolution,” which would usher in a corporate dictatorship to dissolve our democracy’s pesky preoccupation with freedom.

When sharing my interest in using esoteric symbols to fight fascism, I’m often confronted by the belief that the symbols themselves are inherently fascist. It’s a point emphasized by Adorno, who spoke with vitriol about the irrational mysticism that codified germanic mythology into anti-semitic propaganda. I’m well aware of the use of norse mythology to justify nazism, and in response I say, “Why does the right get to have all the fun?” To me, arguing against the occult for condoning irrationality is like arguing against armed resistance for condoning violence, or against a fever for condoning bodily harm. It’s clearly the context that matters.

It’s funny to me that pluto, the planet of transformation is said to rule the 8th sign of scorpio, which is fixed. Maybe the point is that nothing is fixed for long. Nothing lasts forever, not even the normalization of colonial capitalism, of techno feudalism, of plutocracy. Living Room was ultimately conceived of as a sort of clock, an astrologe to delight the cosmos. The installation is meant to briefly capture our dynamic death-driven moment. It’s a meditation on the dark ecology of pluto entering aquarius—impending war, death and the end of empire. The installation is a proposition that we might just survive if we see this war and this death as metaphorical. After all, empire has only ever been a metaphor, but beyond that it’s just us. Tracking close behind are the planets, a grand symphony of tones colliding. They can’t help it—it’s gravity.

Butterflies can’t help but grow wings. The process is rather gruesome though, and gets a grimace from me when watching on youtube. They undulate and uncoil their skin revealing a raw container that will hold them as they turn into goo. Studies show that butterflies remember the pain they experienced as caterpillars, meaning that the cellular goo preserves those memories. Overused and flattened butterfly metaphors hold only a partial truth of transformational breakdown. Transformation is not a surface level fix, it’s a wave that comes from down deep all at once, a tsunami to come crashing down. The reality of transformation is that it takes time, you must start where you are. It’s the phrase that adorns a folded paper moon calendar I created, meant to be a mantra to repeat—start where you are.

While I’m often depressed about where we are starting from, I see a path towards redemption beyond the binary. Maybe there’s a future world where life has a right to root and to roam, where being part plastic is a sign of resiliency, where men follow lunar cycles too. Based on what I’ve seen on instagram, with the right branding I believe that any toxic man could easily be convinced to adopt a matriarchal calendar mirroring the moon phases of the women in their lives, as long as those phases coincided with a bulking and cutting schedule. Maybe men could rule the earth, if

women ruled the sea? Ultimately Sea World is just a fucked up fantasy of mine—we’d be better off if we stopped drawing lines, and embraced the in-between. We need not throw away masculinity, or spirituality, or even america. Instead, let’s get rid of the stripes, and keep the stars.

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You are the center of your 12-house divestment plan.

It all starts with YOU.

This paper examines the intersections of mourning, photography, and diasporic aesthetics through the lens of literary and theoretical works by Jorge Luis Borges, Han Yu, Roland Barthes, and Juli Carson. Anchored in the author’s 2025 exhibition born of what is still becoming at the University Art Gallery in Irvine, CA, the essay explores how affective traces—what Barthes terms punctum—mediate memory, loss, and diasporic longing. Drawing connections between classical Chinese prose, poststructuralist photography theory, and contemporary curatorial practice, the paper reflects on the function of the image as both a site of rupture and a vessel for continuity. Through this interdisciplinary inquiry, the work considers how mourning might become a generative force for reimagining identity, place, and belonging in diasporic life.

This paper explores the varying ways in which new media art currently interacts with the Internet, the network, and Web 2.0; it additionally touches upon the relationship between new media works and their often-tenuous situation within the institution by curators (e.g. in museums, galleries, etc.), as well as social media’s impact on sociality. A loose definition of new media (works using computers, code, digital video, and the Internet, among others), which is a term constantly in flux due to positioning and relevancy in relation to art and technology, is established in order to further explicate artworks that are primarily used to think through overarching related concepts.

My thesis exhibition Do You Want to Quit? Intimacy, Site, Self serves as a both a starting point for research and a larger case study in which to situate the following research; the artists’ works that were artworks included in the exhibition inspired correlations between materialism, community, and the archive as sites of inquiry in relation to new media art. I believe that interacting with new media art through touch exemplifies its importance for and with these three themes, and that both affect theory (as well as emotion in general) experiencing art firsthand are crucial in parsing through this work.

The exhibition Who Gets To Look, which took place in the University Art Gallery in Irvine, California, featured Erik Benjamins’ multimedia installation, A group of elderly ramblers passed by our front door on the way to their hearth... (2016), and Sable Elyse Smith’s single channel videos How We Tell Stories To Children (2015), untitled: Self-Portrait (2013), Men Who Swallow Themselves In Mirrors (2016), and a sculpture title Landscape 1 (2016). Each artist grounded their work in sites of extreme social mediation. Benjamins’ work, comprised of text and field recordings of music and performances that took place in People’s Park in Chengdu, China, examined conventions of home and abroad, comfort and discomfort, through the lens of tourism. Smith’s videos, informed by popular and personal narratives of prison and racialized violence, complicated the boundaries between myth and reality, prompting a consideration of the consequences of representation. By bringing these artworks into conversation with one another, the exhibition sought to reveal how these differing bodies of work challenged notions of personal and national identities being natural, cohesive, and stable. The following thesis, Who Speaks for Who, builds on the theoretical framework of the exhibition to analyze the aesthetic and political propositions that these works implicitly make. As I examine resonances between Benjamins’ and Smith’s bodies of work, my aim is to illustrate how each artist considers the ways in which uncritical modes of viewership insidiously work against the possibility for critical interrogations of identification informed by social constructs and nationalist ideologies.

This thesis is a document about process. Notes on the Occasion of the Celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement, is the English title of a bilingual anthology that set the conceptual groundwork for a day-long event that meditated upon the different aesthetics of response that writers, artists and activists in Southern California and Northern Mexico (Alta and Baja California) employ their respective practices to address positions of precarity after 20 years of free-trade implementation in North America. The anthology compiles the work of Antena, Alicia Garza, Cristina Rivera-Garza, Manuel Paul Lopez, Pepe Rojo, Ultra-red and Amy Sanchez-Arteaga. The text was activated through a series of conversations that took place April 15, 2016 at UCI, during the symposium, A Conversation in Three Parts, also curated by Amy Sanchez-Arteaga. This document constitutes a reflection on the process and methodology of curating this text and this gathering, and the social and political implications of that process upon the field of curatorial studies. These documents were experiments in inciting dialogue around aesthetics, politics and their embodiment in the LA/TJ megalopolis. The conversations and activities that took place during A Conversation in Three Parts, were means to activate Notes… for the first time and model ways that the text could be used in the future.

This thesis considers what a curatorial practice becomes in the cleft between traditional modes of exposition (as textual document or performative discussion), circulation and anecdote: How the same theoretical and aesthetic object (in this case a book) traffics between different contexts and can potentially make space for new political and aesthetic propositions in those contexts. Or, to put it another way how poetics are always already bound up with politics.