I was honored to participate in Toronto’s V-Tape Curatorial Incubator v. 15, What the F**K?!: Video in the Age of Sublime Uncertainty, VTape, Toronto, Canada (December 1, 2019), guest mentored by Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick, alongside an inspiring international roster of curatorial participants. Out of this experience, I curated a video screening and contributed a text for the catalogue, entitled “Remote Preparation.”

“Now that my ladder’s gone / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” 
—W. B. Yeats

Nov. 4 – Dec. 2 | Root Division, San FranciscoOpening Reception: Nov. 11, 2017, 7-10pm
Gallery Hours (or by appointment): Wednesday-Saturday, 2-6pm

Love & Longing shares descents into the unknown, artistic responses that perpetuate their own kind of fulfillment—“when the dark becomes another kind of lover” (John Tarrant). Through trying circumstances, a multiplicity of entanglements, and cascading heartbreaks, the works in Love & Longing share a sensibility fraught with loss, and reactions layered over time.

The exhibition includes works that chip—or pound—away at the wall separating art and life—that challenge, complicate, intensify, confront, and grapple with engagement and connection. Drawing upon a wide range of media and conceptual strategies—from the unflinchingly serious to the deadpan, from one-on-one to participatory encounters—the art works selected visually and aurally engage with unlikely, ungraspable hope, and a call for radical empathy and deepening relationships, in our own dark time.

VIEW LOVE AND LONGING CURATORIAL ESSAY

List of Artists:

Moir Clements (1924-2015) with Mel Day and Laurence UptonMark Clintberg
Miriam Dym
Carissa Potter Carlson
Jonn Herschend
Mark Stock (1951-2014) in collaboration with Gary Janis
Chris Komater
Kija LucasLinda Mary Montano
Jillian McDonald
EfrenAve in collaboration with Pedro Alvarez Perez
Joel Daniel Phillips
Peggy Phelan
Dario Robleto
Welcome Project

and a curated video sampler by in collaboration with
Jaime Cortez, Michelle Wilson, Christopher Scott, Nadav Assor and other guest artists TBA.

Select installation views (photo credits: Kija Lucas)

Moir’s Series is a posthumous collaboration with my grandmother (Nan), Moir Clements (1924-2015). She was a British artist, a Warden in London during World War II, and my grandmother. She painted scenes from all parts of the British Isles, always in oil paint, and often from the front of her motor caravan. Early in her career she became discouraged after her work was repeatedly rejected from exhibitions. She never felt justified calling herself an artist, and, indeed, developed an acerbic disdain for the contemporary British art establishment.

Alongside personal and artistic insecurities and longings (she lost both parents at a young age), her greatest loss was her failing sight. Moir, as she liked to be called, collaborated with her grandson, my cousin Laurence Upton, to create a series of paintings. He painted them, according to her verbal instructions and visual memory—using yellow heavily as the color she could see most clearly. At Root Division, lying by one of these collaborative paintings is a photograph of Moir’s worn-down fuchsia Staedtler pencil. She was the last person to use this pencil until I used it to sign her name posthumously. She was always an artist and is deeply loved.

Following “Moir’s Pencil” in 2017, I created the second work in this series, “Moir’s Lipstick” in 2022. I was inspired by my published conversation with performance theorist and feminist scholar, Peggy Phelan for Danish artist Nanna Lysholt Hanson’s Dura Mater book.