Three Tries: The End
Exhibition and Performance
Echo Contemporary, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Three Tries: The End is the second act in the Three Tries cycle, unfolding as both an exhibition and a durational performance. Where Three Tries:The Beginning traces how the psyche is formed, The End returns to that structure to take it apart, shifting from understanding to direct intervention.
The performance begins with a return. The artist enters wearing institutional clothing, carrying their childhood mattress strapped to their back. Previously activated as a cross, it returns here still as the cross, carried through the gallery and leading into the Edifice.
The Edifice takes the form of a replica of the tomb of Jesus Christ. Once inside, it shifts into a padded room modeled after the space where the artist was held during institutionalization, bringing these two realities together so that religious narrative and lived experience exist within the same enclosure.
Over the course of three days, the work unfolds inside the Edifice as the artist uses A Book for Self-Resurrection to guide the process.Following the structure of the book, they read, write, and carry out the required actions at the same time, allowing memory and the present to fold into one another within the space.
Objects inside function as both altar and archive, bringing together religious items, institutional materials, and personal artifacts. These elements create a space where different systems of understanding the self overlap and compete.
Throughout the performance, the artist is both contained and observed, while also trying to push against those conditions. Surveillance extends across both artist and audience, reinforcing the systems the work examines.
Three Tries: The End asks whether identity can be pulled apart and reshaped beyond the structures that first defined it. Instead of offering a clear resolution, it stays with that tension, leaving space for something new to begin to take form.
The exhibition Three Tries: The End includes the following works:
The Edifice
A Book for Self-Resurrection
Three Tries: The End Performance
Three Tries: The Resurrection
Three Tries: Closing Service
Photography by Tyler Brantley, Travis Dodd, Markiesha Thornton, and Audrey White