PAMS PROJECT
2022-2023
INSERT PAMS PROJECT DESCRIPTION HERE:)
(2) I worked together with friend and fashion designer Hiromu Takeshita to create human sized parakeet wings.
Hairstylist Chela Okana gave me keet-green cornrows and the local nail salon gave me sharp black talons. A sleek green dress completed the transformation.
2022-2023
INSERT PAMS PROJECT DESCRIPTION HERE:)
(2) I worked together with friend and fashion designer Hiromu Takeshita to create human sized parakeet wings.
Hairstylist Chela Okana gave me keet-green cornrows and the local nail salon gave me sharp black talons. A sleek green dress completed the transformation.
2022
Keet zine
(2)
(3) “How to Play Catch With the Keets
The Keet Zine is a publication made up of colorful collages and other mini publications. In forty pages, The Keet Zine uses the parakeet to tell a story about migration, captivity, otherness, and exclusion. Within these pages is also a game guide titled “How to Play Catch With the Keets” based on my first playful encounter with these birds. (3)
To see a video of the Keet Zine flip through click here
2022
The Keet cage
The Keet Cage is an exaggerated bird cage large enough to contain a human or two (1.4×2.3m) and my first metal work sculpture.
It is activated when you step inside the cage. During exhibitions, the Cage was a holding cell for the Keet Zine, offering a caged experience for those who flipped through the zine’s colorful pages and a zoo-like spectacle for those who stood outside of the cage. (4)
(4)
2023
We see them in the sky bright green against this sky of gray
All the research done for this project manifested itself in a 7000-word lecture performance titled “we see them in the sky bright green against this sky of gray”. In nine acts, I speak quickly and erratically about a host of dis/connected things: the mythic arrival of the parakeets in Europe, the obscurity of the exotic pet trade, the cultural obsession with caging birds and black bodies, an out-of-body experience in a Californian ecology dinner and the complexities within my own mixed cultural roots, European supremacy & eugenics & human zoos, and the difference between how black and brown bodies relate to Europe when compared to the United States.
These theories, thoughts, and personal histories are spoken in a scattered and rapid-fire way so as to construct an emotional landscape around the lecture’s main question:
When will collective consciousness accept these parakeets as being native to Europe? When will collective consciousness accept black and brown bodies as being native to Europe?
(performance length is roughly 30′)
