My father once threw my diary into water until the ink bled out. That was a beautiful and terrorizing moment. It was my first installation piece. There were three audience members and it showed in my parent’s bathtub for one week. I didn’t even have to install it, much less consent to it.

Beauty shines through form, not in it. It is its own value and does not depend on the gaze. Beauty happens, in relation. It is the encounter itself.

Those who can let it behold them do. Those who can’t weaponize it and intellectualize about aesthetics.

Except attractiveness exists without beauty. And art exists without aesthetics… as does most everything that has ever made meaning in our world since time immemorial. Phenomenology concludes that the gallery is a lovely cemetery, full of dead things. I revere the dead. I love galleries, museums, libraries, cemeteries, decomposition. I’ve spent so much of my life wandering and wondering about them.

What any of that has to do with art I can’t say. Art happens. The objects are fetish, and still we make because we must.

My frames of reference span Cisneros to Cicadas, Ozaki to Nauman, Mexia to Stout, Schlovsky to Ubu, Tarocchi to Soft Machine, R. Smutt, Negativland, the Ant Farm Collective, Ants, Farms, Collectives, Bees, Honey, Mushrooms, Bears, Trees… and your mother.

My work is play and rings around cutups, text as texture, identity abolition, cycles/systems, inter/intra-relating, and MOTH rights. I am a wave and a particle, sharing hearth with a growing catalyst, a dream weaver and a moon with 9 lives.

Sights, sounds, stories and stuff happen. Sometimes.

Other times kites get flown. because I believe the wind would like a word.

Let’s make art happen! dreamstrayly@gmail.com