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Rosario Parker Gordan

writes about

Moises Salazar Tlatenchi’s

It’s My House

Vitamin Glitter

by

Rosario Parker Gordan

This bill generally prohibits licensed healthcare professionals, establishments, and facilities (collectively referred to as a “healthcare provider”) from performing or offering to perform on a person under 18 years of age (a “minor”), or administering or offering to administer to a minor, a medical procedure if the performance or administration of the procedure is for the purpose of:

(1) Enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the immutable characteristics of the reproductive system that define the minor as male or female, as determined by anatomy and genetics existing at the time of birth (the minor’s “sex”); or

(2) Treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.

For purposes of this bill, a “medical procedure” includes both surgical procedures and the prescribing, administering, or dispensing of a drug or device.

 On a prohibitively cold Minneapolis December evening, stepping into the H+N gallery space filled with glitter creates a strange feeling. It makes the December day feel like a fast forward into spring, a fast forward into those days where it’s finally a combination of both sunny and warm enough to forgo the majority of winter layers. The kind of days that remind me that in the Midwest, we are often deficient in Vitamin D, because the winning combination of both sun and hospitable weather is so rare. Stepping into the gallery space like this feels like getting my dose of Vitamin Glitter.

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One month into 2023, my home state became the leading state in anti-LGBTQ proposed legislation in the nation, with at least 27 bills introduced.

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Cruising Utopia teaches us that queerness is a “horizon of being,” that does not exist in the here and now, but in the what is to come. What is a horizon if not the anticipation, the tiniest peek at the arrival of light?

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As we walk through the gallery, the glitter reflects and refracts every moment of light. Each of my steps leads to a new refraction. The organization of the paintings moves me through a queered time. Moises, as a Queer adult, poses in their paintings with toys that KVL tells me Moises wanted as a child, but could not have – toys they have purchased in the freedom of Queer adulthood. In the basement I watch Moises, the Queer adult, meet Moises, the Queer child. In the basement I can see myself, a Queer adult, reach out to myself, the Queer child.

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In my home state, 55% of transgender youth consider suicide, and 20% of transgender youth attempt suicide.

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When we leave the gallery, we’re giddy – practically high – on glitter. It’s My House has given us something we needed, an essential nutrient we’d been missing in the cold winter months: Queer celebration and joy, images of Queer survival amidst rising Queer persecution.

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Within the structure of glitter is an extremely slim layer of aluminum, 2500 times thinner than a human hair. The sole purpose of this layer is to reflect light. Walking alongside Moises’ paintings, each one sparkles with promise We are Here, We Made It. The glitter throws the tiniest moments of light around the room. I walk through the space wondering where it will catch next, searching for bits on the walls, and in between the floorboards, their accidental presence making the paintings on the walls feel alive, feel moving.

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Haven’t you ever held something glittery, and turned it in your hands, waiting for it to catch the light?

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Salazar’s work celebrates surviving and growing up into a Queer adulthood that allows for messiness, re-definitions of family and the self, and glitter.

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Rosario Parker Gordon is an artist most recently based in Minneapolis, MN. Their work can be found online at rosarioparkergordon.com. 

 

 

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Text A. Nancy Julia Hicks

i. A service between two bodies, shifting or altered in form.

ii. A trance, mutual in the lungs and bones below your skin. You can feel the loud hum. Indifferent to our commonalities until the final expel, lunge, or breath. On my hands and knees I witnessed something swaying among the trees. I say “something” because it fell under not man or animal or machine but hallucination of defilement. I noticed it moving when I heard it first, an untraceable sound, like stretching something unfamiliar so far until it almost breaks or the sound of knocking something over but not seeing where it fell.

iii. To trace a border or to defy, reject, until all is unfamiliar and what is left is full unambiguous autonomy. I shifted the leaves aside to watch as the something plunged its head into the earth, it scooped and held the warm dirt in its withered hands. A small pile had begun to form next to the indifferent something as it clutched so tightly the soil it lifted. The movements were fluid, the spine rolled rubbered while the fingers gripped squarely down, the pace of digging unaltering.

iv. Simultaneity we are neither and both. We are in relation to. I felt the breeze shudder along my own spine and I watched as it carried the wind to flutter the something’s fur. I noticed the back legs were longer than expected and I felt it almost looked human where the fur fell away to show skin. Twisted shape with foul hand. How long will it take for me to become just as it I watch. The something focused so intently on the ground in front of it as a hole opened up before our own eyes.

v. Reciprocity. It had been hours, crouching and watching the something dig the hole. I wondered what it was looking for or if the hole was only an aesthetic object, a mining project, a search for food, or a base for structure. Apply my own motives to the violent movements of the thing that dug before me. I did not feel joy in my watching, nor fear, nor anything else–I simply watched and began to realize that I would not ever know the something and it made me lower my own hips to the ground.

vi. A painful confluence of events—I dig before me, what hope lies below. There is now nothing worse than the ruin of your hands.

“time of abjection is double veiled infinity” (approx. Powers of Horror, Julia Kristen)

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Text B. Maddie Granlund

One time I dug a hole in my backyard. At the top, the roots were thick like arms, and I had to get an ax to cut through them. I dug around the roots; the sky was blue and clear and lit the walls of this tunnel, creating direction. Down here, small bugs writhed around in the disturbed dirt. The roots grew thinner and thinner, sticking out of the ground like eyelashes. I noticed darkness enclosing.

My mom tossed me down a sandwich in a bag. Salami and cheese. As I sat to eat the sandwich, I noticed my sneakers were caked in mud. I pocketed the bag and picked up my shovel to see that the thick roots had started to grow over, creating a ceiling of pinprick light that wove me into my hole.

I continued to dig. I reached a layer now where the dirt turned to clay. The walls around me turned to a saturated orange. My shovel sunk into its sludginess in a satisfying way. The deeper I went, the softer the clay became, until I was wading through it. It was silky like a melted orange dreamsicle. Taking a rest, I heard a dripping sound. It echoed somewhere below me, indicating a space that I could not see. I took a big breath, plunging my head into the clay. With my hands, I pushed at the ground and as I pushed the ground seemed to melt and I sank deeper below. Sliding through a birth canal, I squeezed my shoulders together and wiggled my body back and forth. Suddenly something gave through and I slipped into solid ground. Wiping earth off my eyes, I looked around.

Even in the darkness I could see shimmering flickers of light, though I couldn’t tell where they originated. They seemed to dance back and forth off some kind of shattered surface. I finagled my flashlight from my pocket and turned it on. Suddenly, light filled the whole space, and I saw thousands of crystal formations tucked into the armpits of stalactites. The vibrant orange clay dripped from the ceiling, curving along the stalactites which seemed to be in mid-drip themselves. There was a movement here that was repetitive and at the same time frozen. The flowing nature of the clay seemed to be contradictorily stilled in this place. There were droplets suspended in mid air, mid fall. The crystal barnacles were as clear as mirrors, and I could see a million versions of myself in their reflections – my body appeared half dismembered as I moved past them, sliced into surfaces. I sat here for a long time.

I remembered I had put in a load of laundry before I left. I hoped my mom would switch it over.

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emmy e smith

writes about

activated installations by

Nancy Julia Hicks

Maddie Granlund

J.H. Shuǐ Xiān

Strange Rearrange

by

emmy e smith

At the door, I was handed a half sheet of text transcribing the blue gothic lines printed on the performer’s latex garments. It describes a being digging through rich saturated orange mud through to a cavity which gives way and the being slipping through that cavity onto another surface. It describes the witnessing of this event from a being concealing itself in the woods, tethered to the watching of what is revealed to be an event of substantial duration.

It’s a stark space for people to be such bodies in. The slender black wires that encase the performers extend out of the base of their transparent garments and snake back to their origins. The encased bodies are touching when I enter the gallery, the impression is immediate, intense. They use their functions programmatically. The programs affected each A System, like the system of arm – shoulders – spine – arm/ floor – knees – knuckles – tongue – rock. Floor – belly – hip – elbow – hip – floor. Two body system.

The latex act is pure abjection – the cyborg slips out of the tear that opens up from the friction of the object/subject collision. The wires are a familiar circumstance – headphones twisted around my head at night, cords tangled in my backpack. Here, they hold close, and the bodies they ensnare contain them. Skin, veins, skin, veins. But what is the blood, what is its rhythm? A reciprocal consciousness implied in the near human.  Being back and forth.

 

you know that the blue is a nutrient

related to my snow eating dream

eating the clotted filth of the city, churned over and written on again with more snow

the snow drops and types on a cosmic scale, the terror of an angelic computer keyboard. The program it writes traps us in the past (winter)

the blue carries you up and at  night

it’s not the dull night of winter that closes you in so soon

I retreat downstairs.

//strange rearrange

like in the car, crammed with all my things

(would be much more frantic)

J.H. moves things in arms arcs across the floor.

This is a red place and its underground.

cold, sunk

cold sink

cold floor

cold wall

the personal, per Patrick,

something cluttered – to pull out all of the trinkets.

What I need is blue sky,

star wrap

deep ferrous indigo

The car I arrived here in was deep red, and inside it smelled like food and incense. I needed a lift from a soulless event in St. Paul, needed to escape because my heart was drowning. In the red car, a mother softly consoled her teenage child about birthday disappointments over the speaker phone in a language I do not speak.

how has

understanding of blood

affected my color relationship

Red.

Deep invisible blue

(I am told that when this exhibition was taken down, the walls painted over, there was a deep, chromatic blue seeping out from a years old installation)

 

J.H. has a blue lamp that is on for a time, and then, by crawling, crustacean hand, is shut off. Return the red.

to become in the state of the performer

or, how was it put in latex text?

How long will it take for me to become just as I watch

the text is about digging, slipping through a vibrant mud into another plane, and about this process from the outside.

\we left the riddle intact, in search of food.

—-

night. I dreamed about eating the snow.

——

Returning the following night, the scene continued. To leave and come back in the middle gives the impression that this act is continuous. It is, kind of. It is a section of an arc, like what you see of a star’s progress in your short life. It’s not so much a little story. No room in my belly for abjection, I slip downstairs.

 

(on penny-slinging)

It’s a sport – spell casting

She arcs with the swinging bell, it’s participating in the same phenomenon “arc,” where many pieces describe the same arc.

It’s like they drip (lateral)

It’s like banking,

compulsory moving of value.

The drone has a rainstorm feeling

gotta be still for the downpour

All the noise compressed into a texture, the images spread out into thin, see-through frames. The projection in the shape of a house, the enclosure like something wrought, a yard-place, a chicken coop, a house made for crawling.

I’m in the back like candy

SENSATIONS,

            SENSATIONS.

The drone is coming out of a speaker in the back of the basement. The light from a projector, beside a laptop is showing the same image as the projection at the same time. There is a sheet of OSB blocking you from making a loop back to the performance area, all complicated by the watchers. Through the OSB is J. H., and you can watch them if you kneel in the sawdust and look through some hasty cut out shapes in the plywood. There are no holes to look through between four and five feet. Lookers must crouch or strain for height. The peeping is constrained by the voyee.

The crunching leaves, the heavy tin of coins. A sudden loud sound. candlebearers. A dark red room.

When J.H. ventures over to the hanging red cloths, they are so theatrically veiled, their hand in plane with arm passes between the layers without agitating them. We see the hand emerge from behind a velvet square, softened by mesh. It’s a kind of theater I know but can’t recall.

Trial moons on the sawdust pile

The poker and its shadows breathe through their body

the breath of the arm as the poker hovers over and rises

Shadow orbit traces sticks/

stems surround candle

suspended on – what is this shape called?

Very constant energy. Back upstairs now…

it’s kind of freaking me out

I’m glad I didn’t come here any earlier than I did. In the night between the final two performances I dreamed about eating snow by the mouthful from a wheelbarrow or bucket. It was at school. At first it was so delicious and I couldn’t get enough, but then gradually the snow began to disgust me, I thought about how long it must have been there and how it has piss and vile street fluids on it and it began to taste sour but I kept eating it for a couple of minutes or bites because

well who knows why but I feel like that now, too deep in this performance

Speaking with Milo after the final performance, they surprise me by saying it doesn’t really hurt that much. The bright saturated red areas on heels and elbows and arms – she describes her practice of soft bones, where you soften your bones inside your body. Or anyway maybe its in her head but it seems to work. To me this sounds very advanced. She said that the painful part is when one of the myriad wires is pinned between body and floor, a ridge, cutting. The wire-fed cast latex machines which click and go off at intervals rarely sync. Once, they did, several of them pretending to make the pump action of a heart. Usually though it’s more insect, not such a gentle – breathing – life – action.

All three performers speak about their eyes. J. H. begins, – I had my eyes open a lot more tonight – I noticed that!- Instead of looking in the distance I was looking out and through.

The cyborgs spoke about their eyes as another part of the person machine, another thing to move sharply in a degrading pattern for a long duration.

The drone goes on and off. Upstairs, in the clicks, you can hear it from the basement. Downstairs, the clicks and the bodies thumping and rubbing together lend their noise. The drone goes off.

It’s like Ryan said, the silence gets weird.

Out and through.

Seeing is a kind of breathing. It’s why I can’t swim, not really. Unwilling to drink in rhythms with my eyes, I am always hungry for vision. Looking with my eyes like arms to grasp my way from place to place. Unwilling to delink the rhythms of seeing and breathing.

The latex act is pure abjection – the cyborg slips out of the tear that opens up from the friction of the object/subject collision. The wires are a familiar circumstance – headphones twisted around my head at night, cords tangled in my backpack. Here, they hold close, and the bodies they ensnare contain them. Skin, veins, skin, veins. But what is the blood, what is its rhythm? A reciprocal consciousness implied in the near human.  Being back and forth.

The performance tests your appetite for abjection. Latex snaps and drips as it saps fluid from the performers, their autonomic functions disrupted as well as their conscious functions. Milo moves a rock, Milo has the latex in their mouth. Kneeling asymmetrically on the wires, Maddie pulls the latex in a taut strand across their body, digging in. They go on like this for hours, slowly cycling through the things they come into contact with – a chain of latex cast with hair in it that pokes out, a rock slung in a latex strap. The stone is the only old thing, the latex wrapped beings treat it the same as all of the other objects. Its inclusion contrasts strongly.

At the door, I was handed a half sheet of text transcribing ///

emmy e smith is a writer and artist soon to be completing an MFA program. If you are in the twin cities, her thesis show will be up for viewing April and May of 2023 at MCAD MFA. You can find her zines and chapbook series entitled  “Probably Already Underway” on her website, where she can be reached for questions, comments, commissions and zines // emmyesmith.com