UC Irvine

On the surface, the visual and textual languages of The Keeling (2021) and this encyclopedia are disparately related, but they influence each other synergistically. The visual language of the exhibition is a speculative space suspended between an art gallery and a futuristic natural history museum. Varying levels of scale, abrasivity, hostility, and gentility frame the visual language in The Keeling (2021), and gallery visitors must determine for themselves how they fall along or outside those spectrums of physical and visual perception. Although this text is highly personal, conversational, and anecdotal, it is the accumulation of those thoughts and experiences that informed each work in the exhibition. An encyclopedia of a sublimated version of myself and my art practice to offer a guidebook into the spaces, both tangible and intangible, that I inhabit, have evolved from, and aim to grow into. When each of the ideas behind the works in The Keeling (2021) are sublimated, you receive each of the rambling thoughts in this written thesis. This is all a very long way of explaining that you can’t have me without the work and you can’t have the work without me, but I also don’t really want you to have them together. Therefore, I give you The Encyclopedia of Sublimation (2021) composed alongside and inside The Keeling (2021).