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Union Chapbooks

"Job Insecurity 101: The Precarious Lives of CCA Faculty" (2016) was made collaboratively with adjunct faculty at the California College of the Arts as part of their first contract campaign when I was the organizer at that campus. 

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The other chapbook (2022) is the first project of the California Faculty Association Art Organizing Committee. Contributions are from union members, student interns, and union staff. It is being used during Lobby Days,  chapter events, and new member organizing.

Random Notes

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This is an ongoing project that started in 2013 when three different friends died, one from an overdose, one from breast cancer, one from unknown causes. At the same time my teaching career was crashing to bits. Feeling ripped apart, I started cutting up the Santa Fe Reporter and putting it back together in what seemed like nonsensical combinations, inspired by DADA. The project has continued through my geogrpahical and career moves, becoming a roadmap out of grief and an outline for a memoir. The pieces have been published as poetry and included in art exhibits. A newer iteration has been scaling them from palm-sized to large digital prints.

No Justice, No Service

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"No Justice No Service: Bay Area Art, Education & Justice Festival” was held in 2015 at The Lab in San Francisco. An exploration of union aesthetics in the 21st century, we were using art as a material organizing tool. Artists, performers, writers, educators and professors, unions, and social justice activists came together in support of the adjunct union movement as it intersected with income inequality, racial injustice, gentrification and displacement in the Bay Area.

School's Out for Fever

Three weeks into sheltering in place, in 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, my cousin shared a video during our new ritual of a weekly family zoom. The video was the dean of the Tisch School of Arts dancing to an REM song as a respons to students demands for tuition refunds because of the pandemic. The Dean's tone deaf response  was similar to adminstratos at the unviersity where I was a union rep. not interested in maing bread, I decided my pandemic project was remembering how to make videos, which I hadn't done in years, my partner and Mother-in-Law, who was sheltering-in-place with us co-starred. COVID-19 Aesthetics were born!

Snow Poems

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A line from one of my Random Notes became a part of the Snow Poems project. The project was curated by The Cut + Paste Society in collaboration with the Santa Fe Art Institute in Santa Fe, NM. The poems were created out of non-toxic temporary spray snow on windows all over the city. Appropriately, my poem was placed on the window of Labor Ready. The project included a walking tour map, a postcard book, and culminating poetry reading at Collected Works Bookstore. 

Past Present Future

This project is an exploration of coalition building across differences rather than sameness. Using self-defense lessons to consider the changing ideas of feminism, femininity, and community organizing over the past few decades, I was interested in collapsing the divide between the activity of producing art and the activity of building community. During a five-month period in Los Angeles, forty artists and activists - who span the gender and sexual identity landscape - came together to create videos, performances, public interventions, video installations and a 'zine.

Debris:notes from outside the surface

Debris is a collaborative video and installation created with Wil Nicholson. The piece was born out of a crime that occurred - and a friendship that developed - against the backdrop of the art world, gentrification, race relations, and class realities in Los Angeles. This video delves into  the story.

Debris Installation

Debris installation was done in collaboration  with Wil Nicholson and a whole bunch of each of our friends. Dealing with how to create a friendship a a crime was committed and against the backdrop of the art world, gentrification, race relations, and class realities in Los Angeles, we invited our friends to drink beer and play domnios together. In the middle of an art exhibit. This video documents the process.

Memory Remnants

Memory Remnants of Two Existing Acts of Violence examines where reality and memory meet after experiencing traumatic violence. The violence referenced includes a relationship of mine that ended in gunfire and the brutal rape and murder of a friend, Mia Zapata. I blend archival materials, documentary, and constructed images into a fragmented non-linear montage that imitates the operation of memory as defined through psychoanalytic theory. The video is choreographed to move across two TV monitors.

Unhung Heroes

Unhung Heroes is a short comedy about 5 trans* guys dreaming about having a flesh penis. The video, that I shot and edited, is written and directed by Lazlo (Ilya) Pearlman. After finding an internet article announcing the first penis transplants, the guys imagine a scheme to come up with over a million dollars in surgery money. Unhung Heroes is a time capsule that includes Southern and Northern California queer artists and activists who forged the way in trans* community building and organzing. Look for many cameos and fantastic choreography by Cid Pearlman.

Art

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