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To Kiss on a Battlefield, Act 1

Gallery D301, CalArts, Santa Clarita

March 18 - April 16 2023
MFA Thesis Show
with additional performances by Kayla Dobbs and Aviana Glover

press release
To Kiss on a Battlefied, Act 1: texts - exegesis of To Kiss on a Battlefield, Act 1

Photos by Logan Wolfe and Yun Gi Ahn

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How can something be made (or make itself) by unclaiming capture?
How can something, rather than formally assuming a typical relationship of belonging to its own idea, radically unclaim that connection, to work solely as a sacrificial, oblique return system, a channel upstreaming to an original pulse?
How can something just be bankside, to a river/field, to a stream that is continuous, and continuously opening?
[note to self, March 14th, 2023]

Rooting in such paradoxical questioning to eventually develop as a material, performative and theoretical methodology, To Kiss on a Battlefield revolves on creating and iterating ground. Offering a place to be and nothing to see, the result is a cut running through exhibitional dynamics and the violent assumptions that embed the very acts of seeing and identifying. In Act I, these are both exacerbated and neutralized to acknowledge, expose, and relegate trauma (traced back to its Greek root, 'wound') as the defining paradigm of contemporary life and thought—an exposure and a relegation that allow for an informal imagination of kissing as an inverse, alternative paradigm. "To make something by subjecting it to the same forces that make life unlivable, and to do it as if its aesthetic life depended on it, charges what is made with an incalculable urgency" (P. Chan)

The project’s backbone is entrusted to an open, indeterminate medium, ‘the spread’. Both a process and a custom-assembled, the spread is a semi-liquid solution mirroring the chemical composition of human sweat, altered by a heavy sodium imbalance for heightened visibility. The spread is created by deriving sweat’s main chemicals from pharmaceutical supplements, which are crushed into powder and stirred by hand into hot water pre-mixed with sea salt crystals. A small amount of isopropyl alcohol helps dissolve the powders along with most of the salt crystals, as well as the sebum and other trace components of sweat derived from the stirrer’s hand, already sweaty from crushing the pills. The result is poured on the gallery floor and over the objects populating the show. The liquid slowly stabilizes as an odorous slurry, unevenly crystallizing as it dries, covering all surfaces and all crevices, obfuscating their image, turning them into a ground.