Three Tries: The Beginning
Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design Gallery, Atlanta, USA

Three Tries: The Beginning moves through memory, institutional control, and the attempt to rebuild the artist through repetition. The title points to a return, where the beginning is already connected to what follows, folding back into itself.

The performance unfolds across a series of sculptural stations placed throughout the gallery. These elements draw from both the Stations of the Cross and Freud’s psychosexual stages, tracing the artist’s development and the experiences that led toward trauma, and eventually, toward the possibility of return.

The artist enters without announcement, moving through the space while the audience watches from behind a glass barrier. There’s a sense of distance, of being observed but not fully accessible.

At a constructed altar that doubles as a self-portrait, the artist removes their clothing and places it down as an offering. The gesture marks a shift, moving from protection into exposure.

From there, the body is reconfigured through institutional markers. Clothing associated with psychiatric intake is put on. Wrists and ankles are bound. A bed frame, understood as both part of the body and a representation of Jesus’ cross, is strapped on, lifted, and carried through the space.

Each action moves through different sites of memory, touching on domestic space, escape, hospital intake, and confinement. The objects aren’t just symbolic, they’re activated through contact, through repetition, through the body moving with and against them.

As the performance continues, the distance between the artist and the audience begins to collapse. The artist steps out from behind the barrier and into the shared space, carrying the structure out of the room into the next stage of the Three Tries series; Three Tries: The End

Three Tries: The Beginning treats the body as both subject and site, where systems of control are not only remembered, but physically enacted, resisted, and carried forward. It becomes a way of returning to the past, not to stay there, but to move through it and begin rewriting it.

Photography by Rachel Warren and Savannah O’Leary.