The Beginning
Performance
As the clock strikes 8pm, I slowly walk into the gallery passing several bodies without acknowledgement. The gallery is empty but for the few documenters, and the audience became voyeurs separated by a large window. As I enter the space I immediately walk to Altar for my ego. The piece that became a reflection of forever self to new self. A shrine for me at the age I was institutionalized.
I kneel before the structure and look up to the image of self as I take a deep breath for our survival through that time. I look down at my hands and pull off the leather jacket I now wear as a shield from the binary world and lay it before the structure as final offering and unveiling of my vulnerability now and then. I undress and make my way to the St. Andrews cross, gazing up at the image of the church where I spent my childhood, as an immediate gesture of exposing myself to confront the full extent of the church's physical and psychological influence on my body.
I walk over to Always Present, lift the books from the table and pull out a pair of white sweatpants, a white sweatshirt, and a white undershirt (the clothes I was forced to wear when I was admitted). I place the suit on my naked body and pull-out restraints for my wrists and ankles and strap them to my limbs. I pull out straps from the bottom of the bedside table and walk over to my childhood bed where I meticulously strap it down as a continuation of my body. I finally restrain the structure; I pull the bed from the pile of rocks and flip it so that I can attach my wrists to the straps. My wrists are bound. I lift the bed and place it on my back in the same way jesus carried the cross through the town of jerusalem.
The Beginning Performance, still, 2023. Ernest G. Welch School Of Art & Design Gallery, Atlanta, Ga. Photograph by Rachel Warren
I lift the soft structure onto my back and slowly carry it from the St. Andrews cross; I stop at each sculpture as if walking back through each memory juxtaposed with the actual journey from my bathroom, to running away to Sky’s house, to arriving at the ER, and then the psych wards the next day. As I cross back through this path a trail of rocks and awakening literature is revealed. Stopping one last time at Split to the bone before exiting I’m placed in the cold bathroom, mopping up the evidence of the act I’d hoped to never share with the rest of the world. I take a deep breath and exit the gallery into the lobby where there is no longer a boundary between me and the voyeurs.
The Beginning Performance, still, 2023. Ernest G. Welch School Of Art & Design Gallery, Atlanta, Ga. Photograph by Rachel Warren
Three Tries: The Beginning Performance, still, 2023. Ernest G. Welch School Of Art & Design Gallery, Atlanta, Ga. Photograph by Savannah O’Leary.All eyes on me, complete silence, I’m placed in a trance of completing the journey. Without intention I remember the moment within the stations of the cross89 where jesus falls and I too fall to my knees. I lift myself up with struggling limbs.
I carry myself and the mattress out of the lobby into The End.