Three Tries: The End
Echo Contemporary, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Three Tries: The End is the second act of a three-part performance and exhibition examining the reconstruction of the queer, nonbinary body within systems of religious and psychological control.

The work draws parallels between Christian doctrine and Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the psyche, isolating the id as a site of instinct, rupture, and redefinition.

The performance begins with re-entry. The artist enters the space wearing institutional garments, carrying their childhood mattress strapped to their back. They move into a constructed environment: the Edifice, a replica of Jesus’ tomb created by the artist, referencing the site where his body was placed after dying on the cross and from which he rose on the third day. As the artist enters the Edifice, its interior is revealed to be a replica of the room in which they were once sedated and held during institutionalization. The cross (mattress) is pulled through the gallery, extending the physical and psychological conditions established in Three Tries: The Beginning.

At the center of the Edifice is A Book for Self-Resurrection, a text created by the artist and used to structure a three-day durational process that ultimately leads to the extraction of the id. The book outlines a method for dismantling the psyche, separating the ego and superego in order to temporarily inhabit the id. The artist undergoes this process, ultimately confronting and battling the id.

Through duration, restriction, and repetition, the body functions as both subject and method, testing whether identity can be reconstructed outside imposed moral and social frameworks.

The work positions performance as a site of reprogramming, where memory is not only revisited but actively rewritten through embodied action.