Hydra-machine
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hydra-machine is an installation and expanded artist's book which employs print, poetry, light and sculpture to triangulate queer and trans subjectivities within provisional structures of digestion, multiplication and refraction. hydra-machine is concerned with histories of experimental and interdisciplinary artist's book practices, and asserts that the book's structural flexibility and capacity as a technology of collation provides substantial grounds for investigating its queer possibilities. In hydra-machine, commercial and institutional technologies of sight and print under hierarchical value systems (historically allegiant to capitalism) are made abject in their misuse and appropriation, softened into poetic instruments of contact. The scanner and overhead projector mediate encounters between dissonant forms and establish fields of contingence, fields framed as "queer wilderness"--unstable networks of relation that frame and challenge structures of ordered language and meaning as extensions of heteropatriarchal violence and control. This primary strategy of refraction becomes a metaphor for irrepressible trans and queer desire, and the gallery becomes a site for embodying new organizations of love, body, perception, language and touch. The wild subject is finally able to trace the silhouette of desires which have always been present. In this, my thesis is a machine for myself, located within an uncomfortable, buried and obstinate trans desire. hydra-machine is a book built from a cracked-egg daydream; a book and poem and body which might become refractory and vast and unmappable.
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M.F.A.