DELESSLIN

Suspended from the ceiling, a life-sized canvas frame enclosed the performer seated on a pedestal, their body both present and withheld. Above the head, in bold lettering, hovered a phone number: 803-323-7638. Across the gallery, library index cards dangled from strings, each a directive — “text me you love me,” “text me you hate me,” “tell me about her,” “tell me about it.”

The space swelled with noise: visitors shouted, laughed, jeered, and demanded acknowledgement. Yet the performer sat impassive, never responding to the din. Only through text was exchange possible. Every digital message — prank, threat, confession, erotic overture, unguarded admission — was answered.

The work staged a collision between presence and mediation, interrogating how ubiquitous technologies fracture immediacy, reconfiguring intimacy and estrangement, and how communication routed through the small screen could feel more raw — or more unhinged — than face-to-face encounter.

At sunset, a runway of votive candles was lit — one for every child killed by United States drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and other regions as of the date of the performance. Each candle carried a name, written by hand, and placed in parrellel lines stretching across the space like a landing strip.

Performers and audience members moved slowly along the path, reading the names aloud as they walked. Some candles went dark almost immediately, blown out by gusts of wind entering through the open doors. Others burned for hours, until their wax pooled and the wicks disappeared.

The recitation continued through the night, the sound of voices rising and fading, the sequence of names marked by pauses, mispronunciations, and the low hum of city noise. When the final candle extinguished, the performance ended, just moments before sunrise.

A projection connected the gallery to an online chat roulette platform. On the wall, a live feed of random chat participants appeared at large scale. A webcam aimed at the projected surface captured the audience and sent their image back to the unwitting virtual participant.

At the front of the space, a single button let visitors move to the next connection. Each press brought a new face into the room and sent the gallery’s image back out into the network.

The work examined how strangers met across screens, and how private encounters shifted when made public. Plus it was funny.

Installed in a defunct storefront in Morningside Heights, Snapping Turtle || Wishing Well reconfigured the architecture of commerce into an ecology of myth. A series of panels, painted with clay from our ancestral river, narrated the Catawba story of Rabbit stealing water from Snapping Turtle and encircled a hand-built pond at the center of the space. The artist, costumed in a swim garment, occupied the pond in a state of perpetual saturation: reclining, standing, singing.

An umbrella retrofitted as conduit became both absurd and sacred technology — a pump feeding water upward only to cascade back down, endlessly re-drenching the body beneath. Within this aqueous cycle, the artist layered oral performance: songs of water, the retelling of the Rabbit and Snapping Turtle story, recitations from the International Declaration on the Rights of Water, and songs of honor for the nascent #IdleNoMore movement.

At once elegiac and mischievous, the work sutured Catawba cosmology, hydrological ritual, and juridical text into a single durational score. The storefront became a wishing well, a site of overflow and scarcity, where the soaked body oscillated between oracle, trickster, and drowning witness.