support structures Curator’s Essay
- danilo machado, December 2020
In Sandra Wazaz’s karaoke-style video What’s the word for worse than depression?, 2018, the speaker describes “hanging off / the shower rail / to see if it will hold / my weight.” The words, in black sans serif font, scroll vertically upwards like song lyrics and seem to ask the viewer about what we hold on to, and if those things will sustain us. Envisioning sustainable lives involves many kinds of support structures—physical and digital, social and emotional. These bolster the foundations upon which we build, nourish, and grow in our lives. Interdependency can become a site of creation, while also enabling individuals to support themselves and each other with responsibility and care. These gestures, often political, are central to Disability Justice, aesthetics, and community.
In this virtual exhibition, the artists in Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability Residency consider how the presence, absence, and maintenance of support structures are catalysts for their practices. Using a range of media and disciplines, the work in the show interprets the many meanings of support and structure, interrogating representation, language, and form. Originally conceived as an in-person exhibition at The 8th Floor gallery, due to the pandemic, support structures is now presented as an active website, with new and adapted work by the cohort.
Several of the featured artists utilize film, video, and digital media in their practice. A Classic Hollywood film is the initial reference for Zoey Hart, whose project kindness of strangers (rerendered), 2019-2020, appropriates and manipulates the final scene from the 1951 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, where Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) addresses a doctor with the line “Whoever you are… I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Hart recombines and slowly glitches the 24-second clip to create a triptych of altered stills, interrogating what it means to depend, who is identified as a stranger, and the role of kindness in the context of support(s). For Hart, “glitching redistributes the weight of the image, text, and meaning,” rebutting the trope of the “hysterical” female presented (and exploited) by the film’s ending where Williams’ stage directions describe Blanche’s “tragic radiance.” Hart’s work considers the role strangers may play in networks of support and more broadly honors care and dependency beyond (and despite) medicalization. Hart reflects that “When the unforeseen glitches your abilities and expectations, it’s the stranger who has the choice to intervene, to right, bend, or otherwise alter the shape of your day,” making a call to action to “choose what kind of strangers we ought to be.”
Like Hart, michelle miles experiments with video in her work, often considering the ways blueprints guide the creation of physical spaces and accessibility. With brothers who are professional crane operators and a father who has built and repaired many homes, miles was raised around conversations about construction. In her new video, blueprints, miles utilizes an animation lightboard as the set and incorporates the blueprints of her parent’s home, where the artist is staying during the pandemic. The video shows two hands unfolding drafting paper and slowly drawing the house’s rooms and hallways using a ruler, a level, triangles, and a blue marker. Lines intersect, tools are rearranged, and a sense of intention and patience is conjured.
Sandra Wazaz constructs their videos like a painting, harnessing time-based media’s ability to hold space. Wazaz’s What’s the word for worse than depression?, 2018, combines found video footage, a slowed-down soundtrack of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile”, 2010, mixed with an instrumental version of Jorja Smith’s “Teenage Fantasy”, 2018, and original text in the style of karaoke lyrics. Wazaz’s broader practice draws aesthetics from “bedroom pop” and childhood imagery, constructing worlds where scale and sound are distorted through collaged allusions to the bodily and the cosmic.
Mike DiFeo’s digital calendar and reminders are an integral part of his support structures, considering them a “digital prosthesis” in the context of memory challenges. In the exhibition, DiFeo presents an interactive calendar and a series of digital photographs depicting the artist’s printed lists laid out on a dark studio floor. White paper overlaps between black cables and light stands, showing tasks like “Take my meds,” “Put stuff away,” and “Take those feelings into consideration.” While his previous work has utilized data from declassified government documents, this project marks the first time DiFeo is using personal data. Together, the components of Remind me how to live, 2020, serve to encourage DiFeo—who is also a commercial photographer—to spend more time making art.
Also culling from personal to-do lists is Zoey Hart’s project how we spend our days, 2019-2020, titled after the Annie Dillard adage “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Hart reflects how different bodies experience time and permanence, hand-transferring pre-pandemic notes from the cohort of artists in the show onto marble and porcelain tiles and shards. Tasks—including “buy spray,” “pay library bill,” and “go to therapy”—overlap with doodles and loose language—including “talking to the moon,” “otherwise,” and “text about poetic title”—composing an anonymous mix of the practical and imaginative. This labor-intensive group portrait made through documentation of the pieces, is adapted from Hart’s initial plans to use laser-cut text, a material adaptation echoing the bigger shifts in how we experience and spend time during the pandemic.
In “One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg_mKnRyQIg), 2020, Lizzy De Vita inhabits another digital space, that of the web-based newsletter. Visitors who sign up through the form on the exhibition’s website will receive a daily message from an invisible third party during the show’s run. Online sign-ups have become ubiquitous and usually utilized for market, but here De Vita appropriates the form to share art and writing. The title quotes the character Prue from Virgina Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, and the subtitle is a YouTube link to a lyric video for the Bee Gees’ 1979 song “Reaching Out.” The project reflects the artist’s broader interest in “relational contingencies,” consideration of digital consent, and the “interdependency elicited by a textual relationship,” which was explored in the artist’s earlier work, You’re Gonna Break My Heart Again, 2015, where two strangers exchanged recorded messages. De Vita’s initial work for the physical installation was a site-responsive sculpture investigating external systems built to support bodies—particularly how stability is dependent on weight and gravity, much like the scene described in the text of Wazaz’s video. Dependency remains key in De Vita’s newsletter, which would not exist without the implicit participation of a sign-up.
While some artists present work imbued with digital technology, others work in traditional media. Terry Huber considers his painting practice as one of spiritual healing. His swirling abstractions—large-scale acrylics on canvas and smaller works on paper—are created in what he describes as a trance or hallucination. For Huber, this process is one of purpose, calm, and color—one that supports him in the face of mental health challenges.
States of consciousness also influence the work of ee miller, who presents a collection of paintings, writing, photographs, a sculpture, and archival video titled going slow in the fast lane, 2020. The artist considers the piece a kind of travelogue, mapping constellations and frameworks of psychology, family, astrology, and health insurance. The work is shaped by the artist’s cross-country travels during the pandemic, retracing the steps of their great-great-grandfather, who was a political cartoonist, and reconnecting with their grandmother. miller’s work is in motion, superimposing references and refusing delineations between the astrological and bureaucratic, between lineage and the now. Like De Vita, miller’s piece also includes a log of writing and artwork.
Interrogating sculpture in their practice, interdisciplinary artist Alex Dolores Salerno’s At Work (Grounding Tactics), 2020, is composed of diamond plate flooring atop a bed frame. Within the frame cubbies, the artist has arranged a series of objects, tools, and texts referencing grounding practices and experiential knowledge. One compartment includes copies of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018) and the recent collection Disability Visibility (2020) edited by Alice Wong, alongside a bulb of garlic, a spoon, and the scarred piece of wood seen in Salerno’s new photograph Chiron, 2020. The photograph—in muted, tender shades of brown—depicts a figure holding it with one hand, and offering blessing with another. The object resembles an anatomical heart, alluding to the “Sacred Heart.” The figure’s visible chest scars echo those of the upholstered couch behind them. Chiron is a comet named after a centaur from Greek mythology known as the “wounded healer.” In an astrological chart, Chiron’s placement reveals one’s healing powers. The figure may also be read as “a precarious blessing,” and for Salerno “a symbol of our interdependency with the environment, both built and natural, our healing intertwined.”
support structures maps many connections between the inter/personal and the technological, the textual and the embodied, the architectural and the imagined. It rejects any singular definition of “support” or “structure” and, instead, presents a multitude of entry points framed as a layered conversation. While adapted to a new reality, the artists and the exhibition assert the importance and precarity of structures of support as existing beyond the confines and duration of the pandemic.
The extraordinary circumstances of this year may be the context for some to realize the precarious and essential nature of reciprocal care. Marginalized communities have always practiced mutual aid, redistributing material and non-material resources to survive and thrive—a lived interdependency. The artistic and community practices presented by these artists are ever-needed models of sustainable presents and futures.
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With much gratitude to the artists, Art and Disability Residency Program Director Zoey Hart and the teams coordinating the website and programs for the exhibition: michelle miles, Mike DiFeo, Alex Dolores Salerno, ee miller; the team at The 8th Floor/The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation: Sara Reisman, George Bolster, Anjuli Nanda, and William Furio; Elisabeth Axel, Christine Donellan from Art Beyond Sight; readers and friends Terri C. Smith and Claire Kim; and to Malcolm and my many support structures.
support structures logo: Samantha Benvissuto
