“If I could say to America” is an interactive project designed site-specifically in the Summer of 2012 at Cité Internationale des Artes, an international artist residency in Paris. Devine recorded video monologues and arranged the results by country on a temporary website. The monologues, collected in the artist’s weekly open studios and in social situations, initiated from the question, “If you had two minutes to say anything to America, what would it be?”

A Modern(ist) Love Story, 2014 (video-performance, 4:37)

Auto-Portrait, 2015 (video-performance, 2:09)

Some Music, 2016 (video-performance, 2:22)

The Muse Trilogy investigate cultural definitions of “the muse” that perpetuate not only gendered stereotypes but obsequious notions of artistic enterprise. Incorporating a series of ambiguous narratives and gestures, these works seek to disclose the irretrievable biographies of Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, Jeanne Hébuterne, and Musa McKim. (A fourth piece entitled Mnemosyne uses Edouard Manet’s notorious model Victorine Meurent as its subject, an addendum to the muse theme.)

This series began as a collaboration with Virginia-based writer, LeeAnn Thomas, whose prose poem “Madame Cézanne’s smile, a modern love story” was used as the basis for Devine’s performative interpretation, A Modern(ist) Love Story. This video-performance, completed in 2014, is also based on what little is known of Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, wife of painter Paul Cézanne. An ambiguous set of actions in a limited space animates the seated Hortense, who defiantly chops the apples reminiscent of her husband’s still lifes. Binding and tearing a book references both her own profession as a bookbinder and the the patriarchal literature that would later disavowed her. Ultimately, she is tethered to a chair, as she was in so many of her husband’s portraits of her.

This video became the basis for further research on other such women, lost to history and subsumed under the greatness of the men they loved and aided. The subject of Autoportrait is Jeanne Hébuterne, the companion of Amedeo Modigliani. Like the previous video, this piece was shot in an interior space. Some Music, explored the life of Musa McKim, wife of American painter Philip Guston, and was shot both in studio and outdoors. For both of these works, Devine interviewed and collaborated with leading art history scholars and surviving family to mine appropriate imagery.

The agency of the female subject in these video-performances, elusive and enigmatic, is intended to subvert patriarchal readings that were once the basis of modern art historical analysis. Still, these works also acknowledge and rely upon the cultural assumptions regarding the relationship between male artist and “muse,” disarming the gendered roles and stereotypes we more broadly take for granted.

[Videos can be shown separately or as a trilogy; preview available by request.]

video performance, Epic Red film, 4:29

To read the interview with Women Cinemakers, click here.

Mnemosyne is the epilogue to the muse trilogy that examined Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, Jeanne Hebutérne, and Musa McKim.  Though Mnemosyne's focus is Victorine Meurent, it is named for the Greek goddess of memory, who was also the mother of the nine muses. Often depicted holding the lantern or light of memory, the broken chandelier alludes to moving away from the past, while an obvious homage is made to Meurent with the reference to the iconic painting for which she sat, Luncheon on the Grass. If Mnemosyne alludes to the muse's ability to call upon memory as an important element of creativity, Meurent is the ultimate example of the woman reduced to static image, her own biography completely lost. The thread of the narrative belongs to Mnemosyne, Meurent, and the artist as muse to herself simultaneously. 

Victorine Meurent is likely the most famous nude in the history of Western painting.  Although she and Edouard Manet are not known to have been intimate, she appears as the model for nine of his paintings during a pivotal shift in his artistic direction. Born to a working class family in one of the poorest areas of Paris, Meurent was a street musician and fortunate to acquire work modeling for artists when becoming a courtesan would have been the highest station she could have aspired.  Since she was not Manet’s mistress, and her position in his paintings went beyond portraiture to a central figure in his new, innovative approach to realist scenes, it is in theory as easy to imagine Meurent and Manet as inventive collaborators. The bourgeois Manet was captivated by the independent, street smart eighteen-year-old, and she came to represent the gritty realism of Paris that he was attempting to capture.  

For thirteen years, Meurent was the model to some of Manet’s greatest works, which are also among the most important turning points in Modern art.  But little is known about Meurent after about 1890. There is record of the exhibition of her own paintings in the annual salons, but only one – a small portrait – survives. Although her image is iconic, it is likely that the most famous nude died in poverty.  The “muse” to Manet’s intellect, she did not fall prey to the emotional prettification of a beloved subject; although little is known about her, she was ironically the source for the process of visualizing and celebrating the real over the ideal. 

video installation (digital SLR, 2:35; encaustic over lace on panel on astroturf)

Communion (Eng., noun)

. the service of Christian worship - the Sacrament of Eucharist in Catholicism - at which bread and wine are consecrated and shared

. the sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially on a mental or spiritual level

In May of 1971, 49 women took a train from Belfast, loaded with as many condoms as they could purchase, and were arrested on the platform in Dublin. Contraception was still illegal in the Republic women had helped to liberate, although 240 women actively fought 100 years ago in the Easter Rising of 1916. Like many revolutionary societies, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, women fought for the cause of nationality only to be disenfranchised under the religious patriarchy of the new regime.  When condoms were illegal contraband from British occupied Northern Ireland, the Contraception Train was a watershed act of defiance by the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement.

From the Magdalene Laundries to the marriage bar to the primacy of women as bearer of children, the Catholic Church in Ireland has a long stronghold over women’s autonomy over their own bodies. And although women were kept to the home, poor daughters supported their families as domestic servants and in the needlepoint, weaving, and lace-making industries, only to receive little or nothing in family inheritance.

Inghinidhe na hÉireann, or Daughters of Ireland, references both the first group of women who ran guns for the Easter Rising as well as the continued struggle for equal rights. It is inscribed on a panel of encaustic over lace, indicating the toil of women’s labor; laid on a flat plane of grass, the installation mimics the memorial at Arbor Hill Prison that marks the execution site of the Rising leaders.

The sound element is a keening, the traditional wailing cry that was a custom among women in the Irish countryside.  Rooted in early Celtic culture as part of a long, celebratory wake for the dead, the tradition was banned by the church and is largely a lost practice today.  The wafer and the condom, significantly similar in size, color, and shape, both denote an intimate and sensual experience; a communion where the sacred and profane contradictions of the church wield control over women’s bodies. 

This work was commissioned for a 100 year commemorative exhibition of the Easter Rising at the Hillyer Arts Space in DC. 

performance, 3 hours

Ritual (Eng., noun)

a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered space designed to influence forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests.

There is a near liminal connection between religious ritual and performance art, and a connection between the roles of shaman and artist in transformative experience.  Performance revels in contradictions and ambiguity, so that audiences may glean their own interpretations and potentials for transformation. Whereas rituals tend to be precise, their outcomes can be just as enigmatic. 

The performance stretches across three hours, broken into three twenty-minute segments that total nine ritualistic acts:  Making, Repenting, Cleansing.  The three mounds of sugar, salt, and flour reference the biblical symbolism of kindness, friendship, and truth respectively.  There are twenty different instructions for the audience; each one is repeated three times.

The ambiguous instructions requested from the audience implicate participants in the sustainment of community rituals, and instruct them to both enact and imagine new possibilities for spiritual agency. Those performed by the artist demystify the Eucharist wafer, believed to transubstantiate into the body of Jesus Christ; reference religious supplications and spiritual posturings toward repentance and enlightenment across Eastern and Western practices; and finally subsume the female body beneath the material and ritualistic culture that represses it – anointing (oil), defiling (wine), and purifying (water).  The fluids and the residual flour conjoin the female body with the miraculous and sensuous act of Communion, as well as its domination and repression within the Catholic Church.

The emphasis on the number “3” in the choreography and the installation itself insists upon a Christian recognition of the trinity.  However, the artist pays homage to systems such as Numerology and Astrology that were, like philosophy, suppressed when the structure of the Church was determined at the Nicene Council in the fourth century. Various approaches to Numerology and Astrology predated Christianity by centuries, but were admonished because they contradicted the sovereignty of God in the determination of human fate.  Even today, they are widely viewed as illegitimate systems compared to the accepted practices of patriarchal religions.

This work uses the Catholic sacrament of Eucharist itself as a metaphor for the centrality of patriarchal systems in the enforcement of practices and beliefs we do not question and thereby religions have, for centuries, superseded and instilled our most ingrained attitudes about women’s agency for their own bodies.

As an extension of Communion, this live performance took place five months later at the Bennett Park Art Atrium in Arlington, VA.

Shown Feb - April 2017  in the exhibition "Women Now," commemorating the centennial anniversary of the incarceration of suffragettes at the original site of the prison, now the Workhouse Arts Center.  An exhibition of 11 women artists, "Women Now" also featured Mickalene Thomas, Jenny Holzer, and Jennifer Bartlett.  

The work was featured again in "Home + Discordance = US" at NYU, Washington DC in Sept/Oct, 2017.

In 1913, the suffragettes staged their first march on the eve of President Woodrow Wilson's election.  From that point and through their arrests in 1917, the use of banners as material objects was at the heart of their campaigns and picketing of the White House. It was as much their texts that promulgated their arrests.  Noting the parallels of their use of banners, Devine filmed a group of artists making banners on Martin Luther King Day, days before the 2017 Women's March that would take place the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration.

Additional video was taken of the march itself, and the edited footage revealed specific chants of protest.  Anchored between a dual projection, one of scenes from the Women's March and one of the hands of artists making banners, are over 70 banners, many taken from the White House and Trump Hotel on the night of January 21. 

Devine explores the roots of protest, and a demand for voices to be heard.  Excerpts from speeches by Martin Luther King provides the sound for one video, while the chants of the marching crowd fill the other.  The banners of the Suffragettes and the many signs by the protestors, which became an indelible image of the Women's March, provide a parallel for considering the use of text in the advocation for women's rights over the last century.  

Performed for "Women Now" at the Workhouse Arts Center in Feb, 2017 and again in Aug, 2017 at the Pittsburgh Performance Art Festival. 

When the Suffragettes were harassed, grabbed, and spat upon in the Washington March on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 inauguration, one of them, Dr. Nellie Mark, stated, “I did not know men could be such fiends.”  This performance investigates the possibilities for apathy or allegiance, enmity or friendship in how women and men relate to one another, and how those relations are culturally influenced.

In this 3-hour durational performance, the artist uses her body as the structure for a kind of “tapestry” for collecting viewer recollections.  An emphasis is placed upon material and text, creativity and language in revolutionary protests, a similar theme in her video installation (Un)Silent Sentinel.  At points in the performance, she sews into the tapestry, a recollection of the embroidered banners that were crucial to both the Suffragettes’ persecution and success.

The theme of language and text is also relational to absolute “truths” that we take for granted, and the roots of gendered spaces in sexuality and society that are ingrained in textual culture.  The artist reads excerpts from modern male writers, from those criticized for obscenity (D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Vladimir Nabakov) to those viewed as allies to feminism (Thomas Hardy, Frederick Douglass, Tom Robbins). Interspersed with news and media voices, contemporary articles in print and online, the artist reflects on the social and cultural texts that undermine and influence attitudes related to gender, however subtle.  A selection of interviews and lectures by leading feminists (Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Judith Butler, Chimamanda Adiche) whose writings have influenced the artist provide counterpoint to the effects of misogyny and patriarchy, with an inflection toward intersectional topics in feminism today. 

In media and texts, authorial voices have culturally influenced men in positions of political power today, whose attitudes toward gender in both society and intimate relations have in part been hewn by modernist writers and second wave feminism.  In her role as an educator, the artist also emphasizes authors, novels, and cultural events that a younger generation may not be aware.  In stream of conscious fashion, the fiction of literary forms and the non-fiction of news coalesce and leave the reader/listener grappling with the relationship between text and “truth.”

3-hour durational performance

flour, cornstarch, white chocolate, mints, food color

Commissioned for Art All Night, DC, 2017

Standing out on the façade of the old Wonder Bread Factory are white crosses. In the late nineteenth century, it was established as the Dorsch’s White Cross Bakery.  Not an original part of the architecture, the white crosses were intended to relieve fears that their food products may not be safe after the controversy of Upton Sinclair's 1906 book, The Jungle.

Sinclair intentionally portrayed the horrors of harsh working conditions that particularly exploited the lives of immigrant workers. His intention was to advance the cause of Socialism and labor reform in the U.S.  What remained on the minds of the novel’s readers, however, were rampant  unsanitary conditions in the meat packing / food processing industry. 

The interconnectivity of Capitalism, the commercial food industry, and food poverty have extended with new complexities into the twentieth century.   Wonderwerk for Washington DC by Washington DC provides space to consider collective responsibility, shared labor, and the role of the artist in reimagining and recreating balances of power.

+This piece is dedicated to Yoko Ono, and the work she has given to DC and the world

3-hour durational performance with objects, video projection. Beyond the Obvious, Otis Street Art Projects, Mt. Rainier MD

2-hour performance with objects. VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK “Co-Creation Live Factory – Prologue 1”, Palazzo Mora, Venice, 14-16 December 2017.  all photos (c) Alexander Harbaugh and Lorenza Cini

Instructions for Participation

Choose an object located on the shelves.  Do so intuitively – the first thing that gravitates you.

Statement

The Western tradition of philosophy is largely based on logical, cause-and-effect sequences.  In his theory of synchronicity, Carl Jung suggested that meaningful events are no less legitimate just because they cannot be explained by causality.  These “coincidences” may, in fact, not be coincidences, but like quantum physics have cause-and-effect links that are simply beyond our capacity of knowing.

“I can remember things before they happen” refers to one of Jung’s favorite anecdotes to synchronicity, a conversation between Alice and the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, in which the queen suggests that memory can work both ways:  “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”  Between the short stories of Paul Auster, accounting real life coincidences, and the novels of Tom Robbins, where objects are attributed properties that allow them movement beyond our normal capacities of observation, Devine gleans the possibility that objects, when properly contained, will become the basis for sensuous communication.

The selected objects for the work's initial performance were based on inquiries into representations of “sacred and personal” with sixteen women. In Venice, the objects were accumulated from other artists during the performance week.  Devine presupposes the totemic properties of objects as a basis for an exploration of synchronicity with the viewer.  While this kind of object communication is obviously an aesthetic concept in visual art, Devine hinges it within the everyday, with her own body as the exposed medium.  Testing the viewer’s comfort with these modes of communication – intimate and vulnerable, irrational and spiritual – the artist anticipates that viewers will find as much reassurance in coincidences with meaning than causal reality without it. 

VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK “Co-Creation Live Factory – Prologue 1”, Palazzo Mora, Venice, 14-16 December 2017.  all photos (c) Lorenza Cini

Come Home was a collaborative work, a culmination of actions and experiences among participating artists in the Venice Performance Art Week and led by VestAndPage.   

The text of the performance, written by VestAndPage, was accumulated and excerpted from aesthetic conversations and critiques throughout the week. 

I am new
to this experience of
being
inside myself
controlled by others
I am vulnerable yet I am safe I am weak yet I am strong

I know my past, but I can’t see my future. The future is in my back
my past is in my front –
So I harbor the tension in my back and expose it to you,
just to cover it again, to externalize, contain.

I am on the thin line
between scaring and relieving trauma – sane or insane.

I am the organic Opus Dei. Mortified. I am an altar.
I don’t stop you. I need time.

We’re cutting women up turning them into objects. Post-traumatic cellular genetics.

I am the crack.
I open up,
so the water can pass.
These stones are parts of the scars
of the crevasses of the ancestral territory. I am nothing.

I am who I am
I carry some things with me without ‘being’ them I am everything
I am in a body that is my body
I was thin tall beautiful, now I am old

I am not ’we’
I am I
I am not speaking out anybody else’s truth
I am a body that is by nature radical
Digging to the roots
I am an entry point
As my story is your story
And I am many
I am not just one body
And still
When you confront yourself with me – is it still universal?

Would you stand with me, and hold my hand?

In the ambience of life we become sore.

You’re damned if you do
and you’re damned if you don’t. To not see
and expect to be seen...

There’s so much we don’t know but we try to play normal. When does it get real?
(That’s my only issue with art.)

Cracks have opened so water flows life is a minefield
where we go beyond
the simple action to honor the issue

And what do we want to create from here? We are standing.
We are never on solid ground.
We continue.

All we have to do is a simple act.

None before me had the chance to live their desires.

And all of the knowledge that is in the space is what we are
together.
No one shall be afraid of their truth.

We are projecting onto the image we are in to. And yet,
I don’t believe
in universality, because there is always culture.

And when we can name it, we can look at it.
And when we’re ready,
we can throw it away.

We choose our labels. And we throw them away when we need to.

I want to understand otherness. It is so difficult
to be
different.

Bodies need to be
unpacked.
The other – the special one – could be the hyper-physics – the bridge.

I can.
Or maybe not. 

9-hour durational performance, sound & video installation

for the centennial of the Torpedo Factory building

The site of the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria has a long and complex story. This performance reflects on Alexandria’s intersecting histories of slavery and the manufacturing of weapons, both of which are arguably unified by the objectives of capitalism.

During the Civil War, thousands of slaves made their way to Union-occupied Alexandria for sanctuary. To avoid violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and to safe keep against their concern that slaves would be used militarily against them, the Union Army held them as “contraband.” This defined these refugees as a supply gained through war and therefore rightful to withhold from use, while also emphasizing their status as property.

In 1918, along the same banks of the Potomac River where the escaped slaves had camped in shanty towns riddled with disease, the Torpedo Factory was built to sell armaments to the allies fighting in World War I. The torpedoes were designed to span a range of 4500 yards. It is estimated that 10,000 torpedoes were manufactured, for both World Wars, and sunk an estimated 1500 ships.

The lives lost as a result of slavery, and those who were killed at sea by the torpedoes made here, are inestimable and ultimately the casualties of man’s insatiable desire for dominance and resources. To mark a memorium, for a total of 4500 yards the artist drags a crate of rock and detritus -- suggestive of the scuttled ships and “fill in” (wooden crates filled with debris) that make the framework of banked out land where the factory sits.

The sound element includes the seismic recordings from submarines, in sync with projections of historic photos from Alexandria’s public archives. The artist’s performance co-recognizes the relationship between war and capitalism and, in its simplicity and duration, pays tribute to their casualties and celebrates the transformation of the factory into a center for art in 1970.

...but the so little that had been left was so much is an ongoing investigation of memory as an embodied relationship to environment. Emerging from research begun with Mnemosyne (2016) and a subsequent collaboration with neuroscientists studying short- and long-term memory, the project considers how sensory experience binds memory to place—and what remains when those environments and their living beings are transformed or lost.

Beginning in Australia in June 2019, shortly before devastating wildfires transformed the region, I began creating performative photographic interventions in distinctive environments across Australia and the United States, then eventually Europe. Field recordings of wildlife from these sites are transmitted through the Mnemonic (Sound) System, a sound chair that returns the recorded environment to the body through listening and vibration. Performance photography, sound, drawings on handmade paper, and natural material operate not simply as documentation; they become intermediary forms through which an experiences of place can be recalled, embodied, and carried elsewhere.

Central to the inquiry is the object itself as a repository of environmental memory. My use of processed wool fiber emerged from an interest in the transformation of Australia's wool industry under globalization. Historically associated with the country's pastoral landscapes, Australian Merino wool circulates through international networks of processing and manufacture, acquiring new identities and commercial value far from its origins. Occupying a space between raw material and finished commodity, processed wool becomes an intermediary presence, one that retains a physical connection to the animal and environment from which it originated, even as those relationships become increasingly obscured. Recent controversies surrounding wool production further complicate this material history, drawing attention to the ethical and ecological consequences of our relationships with the natural world.

Through sensory installation, material interventions, and performative encounters with landscape, ...but the so little that had been left was so much considers how objects carry the memory of place, how the body retains its sensory impressions, and how these traces might deepen our awareness of environments upon which we depend, even as we transfrom and diminish them.

+++++++++

Artist Notes

While conducting research for Venice Performance Art Week, I encountered a book that docuemented the Venetian artworks lost to centuries of war and flooding. One quote stood out to me: “There is so little left in the world, but the so little that had been left was so much.” Although written about the loss of art, it seemed equally relevant to the environmental losses due to climate change. What can we retain in memory when the places, species, and experiences that shape our world are disappearing?

What I ended up doing for my solo piece in Venice was an earlier work “I can remember things before they happen.” Another quote, this time from Alice in Wonderland, that begins with “It’s a poor kind of memory that only works backward.”

Ultimately, I performed an earlier work in Venice, I can remember things before they happen, whose title was inspired by another literary passage, this time from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass: “It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”

Questions of what and how we remember have occupied my thinking about art since completing Mnemosyne. Then, I understood that work primarily through its feminist investigation of the muse (which currently drives my scholarly research). Yet that research also revealed how deeply the artistic process has been indebted to memory since the Ancient Greeks. Their understanding of Mnemosyne, the personification of memory and mother to the Muses, suggested that memory is not simpy a recurring artistic theme but embedded within the creative process. It is a term that has, perhaps, replaced the Muse as invocation, so frequently appearing within contemporary artist statements that it risks cliché. Therefore, I sought to acquire its specificity.

My subsequent collaboration with neuroscientists expanded this understanding. Memory is not simply a means of retrieving the past; it also enables us to imagine and anticipate the future. Sight, touch, sound, and especially scent connect ongoing experience to memory, allowing sensory impressions to endure beyond the moments and places in which they originated.

This understanding has become central to ...but the so little that had been left was so much. As environments change and species face extinction, I am interested in how sensory and material traces might preserve our encounters with the natural world. Such fragments cannot replace what is lost, but they can sustain a relationship to it, carrying memory forward and perhaps deepening our awareness of what remains.

virtual performance for International Online Performance Art Festival, 26 Nov 2020

video format for VisArts, Maryland, Dec 2020

“Not every artist is a chess player, but every chess player is an artist.”

--Marcel Duchamp

“Play Chess alone and you will always win.”

--Anonymous

Splitting her time between Cologne and Washington, DC, Devine was separated from her German partner for over six months of the Covid pandemic. In many ways, this historic moment has forced the world into a reconsideration of confinement, movement, travel, borders, and the tensions of our relationship with self and responsibility toward others.

Now reunited with her partner, from the city center of Cologne Devine’s piece is performed in their Souterrain Wohnung (below-ground apartment) during Germany’s second lockdown. Although the apartment was originally a nineteenth-century wine cellar, Devine cannot help but think of its possible use as a Luftschutzbunker (air raid shelter) during World War II when many of the city’s citizens would have used such spaces for safety. In contrast to single nights of intense terror during a war, Devine emphasizes its present purpose as a long-term place of shelter during a pandemic to amplify the space’s potential for the solitary activities of contemplation, reflection, meditation, imagination, and even joy.

Devine’s practice is informed by parallels between past and present. Her performances are installation-based and site-specific, designed from the histories of the locations where she performs. Here, the double barrel-vaulted space of the apartment recalls the long history of Cologne, dated to the Romans, and the white walls and furniture lend it an ascetic monasticism, even while recalling the lounging women-as-objects of art historical painting. Her attire blends her into the space but her “crown” references the city’s vibrant tradition of Karneval, the Queen persona in the Chess game and, of course, the new “luxury leisurewear” of current Covid fashion.

In this performance, Devine positions Chess as the central arrangement for meditation, creativity, and individual attention as a kind of endgame. She makes a homage to the many artists who have celebrated Chess as a superior mental activity, while denoting the game’s emphasis on strategy and social hierarchies by reading from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. In Chess, the move 0-0-0 is known as “castling,” a safe yet active position in the game, and the number has obvious reference to infinity; signaling a metaphoric need to envision the current moment from a broader perspective, one perhaps less combative and more reflective, less individual and more collective.

Performed for the 55th Annual People’s Flag Show, Judson Memorial Church, New York. Photos by Robert Barbarello.

ReStitch is an interactive performance that interrogates the American flag as a symbol of “liberty and justice for all” as well as challenges its sanctity in times of extremist suppression. Building upon the themes of Devine’s community-based and interactive performances, this project confronts American mythologies through women’s labor and cultural identity.

Sitting in a rocking chair—an emblem of domestic Americana and imagery of Betsy Ross—methodically sewing together a new American flag from disparate materials, the performance begins with scraps of an authentic deconstructed flag: its stars, red and white stripes, severed into their component parts. Alongside these fragments is a pile of other fabrics and materials of different symbolisms: denim, prison uniform cloth, metallic emergency blankets used at migrant detention centers, and camouflage fabric. 

Viewers will also be invited to contribute their own scraps as the flag is restitched. The act embodies both rupture and repair, interrogating the ideals stitched into the nation’s fabric and how they can be reimagined or resisted in collective hands. The resulting new object is now included in the People’s Flag Show Archives of Judson Memorial Church.

Carrying Capacity was a performance for two separate sites in 2026. In July, it was performed as Carrying Capacity: Venice for PERFORMATICA-Venice: Corpus Migranté and in September, it was performed across two days for Art in Odd Places 2026: UTOPIAS as Carrying Capacity: New York.

Venice photos by Veronica Peña. New York photos by Robert Barbarello.

Carrying Capacity: Venice was a durational performance examining the migrant body as a container of visible and invisible inheritances. Attached to my body were transparent bags, each holding materials that speak to memory, attachment, and loss.

As I ran, walked, crawled, and paused through the city's public spaces, my movements were non-linear, indecisive, but responsive to architecture, to bodies, and to the push and pull of what I carried.

The performance called viewers to witness the physical and emotional weight of migration/movement, not as a single act of crossing but as a continual process of becoming and unbecoming.

Carrying Capacity: New York was a performance that examined circulation, care, labor, and value within the urban environment.

Throughout each festival day, I slowly transported a 30-inch transparent sphere along a continuous route through the designated festival corridor, repeatedly lifting, carrying, and lowering, the sphere in an ongoing cycle.

Neither sculpture nor prop, the sphere recalls an artwork, a luxury commodity, a sacred vessel, or a burden requiring continual care. The first day, the festival zone was between 1st and 3rd Avenues on 14th Street, an area near hospitals, residential buildings, and service networks; the act of carrying was suggestive of caregiving, protection, and invisible labor.

On the second day, further west between 6th and 10th Avenues and near retail districts, galleries and areas of tourism, the identical gestures entered systems of spectacle, consumption, and exchange.

The repetitive actions transform ordinary movement into sustained labor, and the sound elements emanating from inside the sphere invited passersby to reconsider the possibilities of everyday life through sustained attention to poetry, music, breath, and animals in nature.

Following the 2016 election, the ArtWatch collective was formed and continued to be active for the remainder of Trump’s first term. Erin played an essential role by co-curating with Shante Bullock What Feminism Looks Like (2018), assisting with the traveling exhibition One House (2019-20), and in developing and staging actions shown here.

ArtWatch participated in organized marches, such as the DC Women’s Marches as well as guerrilla actions. Memorializing Democracy occurred in front of the White House on Memorial Day 2018. Participants were asked to read from Amy Siskind’s The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year. A makeshift moving platform ameliorated the prohibition against public speaking in-place at that pedestrian site.

In late 2020, ArtWatch went from embassy to embassy, thanking countries for retaining its agreement with the Paris Climate Accord, leaving a letter tied to a laurel of bamboo.

The Miss Amer(I)Can pageant was based on an earlier action Erin had developed with students in support of pro-choice autonomy. In the ArtWatch iteration, a satire of the traditional beauty pageant, the action redefined what it means to be a "contestant;" a parody of gender normativity, it was open to all. Unlike traditional pageants that emphasize physical beauty and strict codes of conduct, Miss Amer(I)Can awarded contestants for social justice and community impact.

Taking place at the Eaton Hotel on November 2, 2019 it began with a workshop called the Sash Swag Party. Participants were asked to reflect on one key social issue, presented with tools for conducting fact-based research that included how to spot manipulative disinformation. On index cards, they wrote a summary to highlight key points of the issue and why it is important to a democratic society. Provided with blank white sashes and art supplies they also made their own creative interpretation of the issue they represent. The Pageant Parade then followed with Erin as mc, and a panel of judges selected from the audience rated contestants for the title Miss Amer(I)Can based on the "most sincere evocation."

ArtWatch thought its work was done, until Trump was reelected and took office in January 2025. ArtWatchV2.0 began. Participating in the Fall of Freedom actions on November 23, Gold is Gauche is the first guerrilla action for the renewed collective, designed by Erin, Jackie Hoysted, and Lilian Blom and drawing dozens of participants.

Starting at the Lincoln Memorial and promenading to The People’s House, Gold is Gauche is spectacle and subversion, exposing the propagandistic choreography between monumentality, urban design, and the aesthetics of power that flirt with totalitarian desire.

From the imagined Neo-Arc d’Trump to the “demolition” of the East Wing, Gold is Gauche builds upon Gavin Newsom’s hilarious AI-generated vision of Trump as Marie Antoinette. Reclaiming her gilded excess, ArtWatchV2.0 holds a golden mirror to the regime’s vanity as an opera buffa—grotesque and dazzling, a satirical vernacular of the country’s gilded decline.