It’s been a while! Feeling deeply conflicted and insecure about social media has led me back to the tried and true newsletter – so here’s an attempt to share what I’ve been up to as I come to the end of my time in grad school (😨 but also 🥳). 

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The show at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on PSU’s campus just opened, featuring my graduate project, Repair Process/Process Repair, as well as some incredible work by my cohort (Simeen Anjum, Clara Harlow, and Nina Vichayapai) and 50 BFA students. If you’re in Portland, check it out! It’s best experienced in person! It’s up through June 5th. 

My installation chronicles the two-ish year process of working with my mom, Ellen, towards a reenactment of the moment in which I told her and my dad that I wanted top surgery. A foray into durational art (thanks contemporary art, it’s all about the framing!), I consider the whole time, from me first proposing the idea to my mom in the fall of 2023 to the final iteration of the reenactment which we filmed in December 2026, as part of the project, shifting the focus from the final outcome or product to the slow, intimate process of stitching an important relationship back together. If you’d like to see the video, it’s up at the show, or you can email me! 

This project is an attempt to answer a few questions:

• How do you move through painful, hurtful moments with people you care about, work closely with, or share values with? (I make this distinction because I do believe that sometimes you do need to avoid things or end relationships when the time is right)

• How might we implement the transformative justice ideas of creating systems of care and ways of addressing harm that don’t depend on punitive, alienating “solutions”? What might that look like on an intimate scale?

• When working through conflict, what happens to our bodies? What is the relationship between the words we say (or don’t say) and how we feel on an internal, somatic level? How might we use this relationship to help us move through hard things? 

The third set of questions inspired the interactive part of the installation. Sometimes words just aren’t enough. Using letterpress, a slow, old-fashioned printmaking system, I made a series of movement ‘scores’ for conflict, inspired by conflicts I’ve experienced or witnessed, that I invite museum goers to participate in. A craft like letterpress and working through conflict have a clear tie to me—they’re both things you work through with your body, and they both require time, attention, practice, and sometimes a bit of outside help. 

I hope this installation brings interpersonal hurt and disagreement into a somatic level, giving us all a chance to practice how it feels to be in these hard situations that we all encounter at different times. By practicing, perhaps we can not shy away from them when they happen for real. Finally, people are invited to take home the question or tool they most need when approaching hard moments in their own relationships in the form of a small card. Most of them were gone when I went back! I’m making more (but they won’t be quite as cute).

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Also, I finished my graduate publication! A compilation of interviews I did over the years as part of the Social Forms of Art Journal, I interview artists, activists, neighbors, and my dad! Email me if you want to buy a copy ($0-$25) or check out the interviews all online.

Lastly – thanks for making it to the end! I’m giving a graduate lecture at Taborspace in SE Portland, Thursday, June 4th, at 5pm with Simeen Anjum (Clara and Nina are the next day at Matt Dishman Auditorium!). There will be a virtual option (TBD). Hope you can make it and give me hope that I can still form meaningful relationships without instagram. 

If you’re getting this, I think you’re really cool and I’m glad to know you, and my subscriber count is small enough that that is the truth!!

With love,

Lou