Pieces featured in solo exhibition Byproducts of an Empire [February 4, 2021 - April 11, 2021]
Coffman Memorial Union Second Floor Gallery // 300 Washington Ave SE // Minneapolis, MN 55455
Exhibition catalogue and transcripts can be viewed here.
Conte, graphite, ink, digital collage, personal writing, 20 in. W x 28 in. H, 2020
*Note: Passages in quotes were taken from, respectively: the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture; a Border Patrol agent in Havre, Montana questioning two people for speaking Spanish in 2018; LAPD communications following the physical assault of Rodney King by LAPD officers in 1991; the phrase “to cull through anticipation,” is in reference to a passage from Jasbir K. Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages.
Citizen production is alchemy on levels both micro and macro. Citizen production is vivisection on levels both micro and macro. Citizen production is the acquisition of a permissibly extensive vocabulary, of a permissibly broad imagination and of a permissibly rational discourse for citizen production to no longer be only viewed and described within the negative connotations associated with alchemy and vivisection on levels both micro and macro. Citizen production is to become very aware of the sounds your mouth can no longer make upon its crossing thresholds of earths, plastics, papers, concretes, other sounds, other mouths, other fists. Citizen production is to become very aware of the sounds your body must now make upon its crossing thresholds of earths, plastics, papers, concretes, other sounds, other mouths, other fists. Citizen production is to become grateful that you were fortunate enough to no longer be implicated by the sounds other mouths make now that yours no longer need make the same stupid, dangerous sounds.
Citizen production is to rid oneself of the impracticable possibilities of land for the brute safety of the border, the certainty of territory. Citizen protection is to grasp the benefits of appraisal, delineation, and categorization. Citizen production finds comfort in the proper channels. Citizen production is not diaspora, but nostalgia. Citizen production is to naturalize that which was perviously unnatural. Citizen production is to learn you really aren’t so bad for a fillintheblank. Citizen production is to curate, to cull through anticipation.
Citizen production is to rehabilitate your alien semiotics and remember signified concepts of things like CABLE, POWER DRILL, BROOMSTICK, CELL, HOOD, ZIPTIE or M4 CARBINE and the signifier of things like “lying motionless on his right side with his hands and feet shackled together and his feet shackled to the wall…small amount of blood coming from his nose and mouth…in a sweatshirt but had no pants…died of hypothermia” or “…Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came in here and I saw that you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here” or “1:12 a.m.: From Powell/Wind to foot patrol officer: ‘…ooops’ 1:12 a.m.: From foot patrol to Powell: ‘ooops, what?’ 1:13 a.m.: From Powell/Wind to foot patrol: ‘I haven’t beaten anyone this bad in a long time.’” Citizen production is to remember these are all signs of law, nation, protection and love. Citizen production is to be tasked with using any and all resources and systems at your disposal, including but not limited to: ballpoint pens, receipts, fists, matrimony, visible and invisible lines, park bench design, familial structures, calling the cops, housing applications, clean sheets, medicine, dogs, flashing lights, voluntary and involuntary ingestions via plastic tubing, inefficient public transit, one-way glass, superheroes, capital, still and video images, sticks, intentionally consistent and intentionally inconsistent regulation, loan approval and schools all in service towards others’ processes of citizen production.
Citizen production is to be illuminated by means both experiential and theoretical about the things that will be done to your body if it is found to be the wrong body. Citizen production is to become grateful that you were fortunate enough to become knowledgeable about the things that will; be done to your body if it is found to be the wrong body by means of a largely theoretical basis rather than b y means of an experiential one. Citizen production is to rearrange the wrong body into the right one.
Citizen production is to be injected with love. Citizen production is to accept the gift of being made to understand that you are AT RISK, rather than to be so self-serving as to demand the origins of RISK. Citizen production is to believe in the golden rule stating that you would want these same efforts to be employed toward your own processes of citizen production, were they not already currently employed towards your own processes of citizen production.
Conte, graphite, ink, digital collage, personal writing, 20 in. W x 16 in. H, 2020
Conte, graphite, ink, acrylic, digital collage, [text excerpt from William T. Vollman’s The Atlas], 17 in. W x 22 in. H, 2021
*Note: Document excerpts were compiled from: The Washington Post’s 2008 “Careless Detention” series, an investigative report on systemic medical neglect in DIHS/ICE facilities; correspondence of York County Prison (York, Pennsylvania) Deputy Warden, Roger Thomas, regarding DIHS/ICE failures to provide timely medical care to detained individuals in 2005; Edwidge Danticat’s written testimony for the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law, regarding the 2004 death of her uncle, Joseph Danticat, due to lack of care while in ICE custody; correspondence of El Centro Medical Referral Center Clinical Director, Carlos Duchesne, M.D., regarding the July 20, 2007 death of Victoria Alfonso Arellano due to lack of care while in ICE custody; 2018 United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division Investigation of the Portsmouth, Virginia Hampton Roads Regional Jail.
Conte, graphite, ink, digital collage, personal writing, 20 in. W x 16 in. H, 2020
*Note: Quoted passages were taken from Jeep Official Website and A History of the Roman People (Allen M. Ward, Fritz M. Heichelheim, Cedric A. Yeo).
Conte, graphite, ink, digital collage [text excerpts from Gloria Anzaldúa’s El Sonavabitche and Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics], 20 in. W x 16 in. H, 2019
*Note: Document excerpts taken from USCIS N-400 Application for Naturalization.
Conte, graphite, ink, acrylic, digital collage, personal writing, 17 in. W x 22 in. H, 2019
Conte, graphite, ink, digital collage, personal writing, 17 in. W x 22 in. H, 2020
Conte, graphite, ink, digital collage, personal writing, 20 in. W x 16 in. H, 2019
*Note: Quoted passage taken from 2010 film, Shutter Island.