creative labor is inseparable from daily life.
the studio is a site of inquiry. the classroom is a site of production. the organizing meeting is a site of knowledge-making. art, research, scholarship, making, thinking — the same activity, approached from different angles, sustained over time.
i have been doing this since 1996. that duration is its own argument.
this research operates from necessity, not hope. hope belongs to a grammar of later — a promise shaped by structures that have already failed. what animates this work is the pressure of the present: the need to care, to gather, to build small infrastructures of survival where none exist.
labor and life are one. care is work. maintenance is method. showing up — again and again, without recognition or reward — is its own form of rigor.
refusal is a practice of staying accountable within compromised structures while building something else alongside them.
my research centers on labor, value and practice as lived conditions. labor is the organizing logic of daily life, the structure through which time, bodies and meaning are distributed and withheld. value emerges through relation, endurance and care. artistic practice is the method through which they are tested, complicated and kept alive.
i work across installation, light, space, performance, pedagogy and writing. the medium running through all of them is continuity — the conditions under which relation, care and shared time persist outside the market and outside institutional recognition.
what i am building is not only a body of work. it is a set of parallel structures: reading ecosystems, pedagogical frameworks, durational practices, community agreements, collective rituals — spaces where care is the operating logic and time moves differently. these are alternatives — fragile, underfunded, sometimes invisible, always ongoing.
infrastructure built where existing structures fail or refuse.
this research is in motion. it draws from labor theory, institutional critique, radical pedagogy, ethnography and the long history of artists who have understood practice as a form of social and political intervention. it is informed by marx and federici, graeber and weeks, robinson and wilderson, hooks and freire — and by ukeles, bruguera, pope.l, gonzález-torres and the many artists who built livable structures where none existed.
theory is made — through repetition, gesture and the ordinary rituals of care and attention. practice is already epistemological. phenomenological inquiry is part of this — attending to experience as it unfolds, to perception, presence and the body as sites of knowledge. knowing happens in the studio, the classroom, the street, the meeting — wherever life insists on meaning.
this research will document, participate in and theorize practices that already exceed capitalist value regimes.
continuity built outside the terms the institution recognizes.
this is a work-in-progress.
because transformation is not a theory — it is a practice.
and it is built, slowly, together, by people who show up.
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