Body on Me Exhibition Program

Curated by Kristan Kennedy PICA Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art

Cameron Clayborn .Compost Cooperative Tabitha Nikolai Myra Lilith Day garima thakur Zan Kerrigan Carly Barton Vishal Jugdeo

Gallery Hours Thursdays 5:00 – 8:00 PM Fridays 12:00 – 6:00 PM Saturdays 12:00 – 4:00 PM

October 18 – December 20, 2025 Opening Reception Saturday, October 18, 4:00 – 6:00 PM with a performance by Cameron Clayborn at 5:30 PM

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Gallery Map

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Cameron Clayborn 1. here and here and there and there, 2025 Amplifier, inflatable sun, and vinyl Installation/Performance, 25 minutes Cameron Clayborn 2. Ampvac, 2023 Amplifier, stool, handle, wax, photo, paint 39 × 17 × 15 inches Photo: Greg Carideo Cameron Clayborn 3. for sister (window), 2025 Epoxy putty, lavender, metal clamps, plaster, and wire 108 x 72 x 3 inches Vishal Jugdeo 4. RELIEF COMPOSITION, 2025 Two channel 4K video with sound, sculptural and kinetic elements 14 minutes Animation: Cielo Saucedo Sound: Emir X. West Edit: Nicolas Burrier Cameron Clayborn 5. sealed in light’s edges, 2025 Colored pencil, gel medium, ink, photo transfer, and watercolor 34.25 x 54.75 inches

.Compost Cooperative (Tabitha Nikolai, Myra Lilith Day, garima thakur, Zan Kerrigan, and Carly Barton) 6. The Alembic Hotel, 2025 Plywood, carpet, acrylic, vinyl, various found objects, cables, ducts, and video game made in the Unity game engine Cameron Clayborn 7. dead in the water, well maybe, 2025 Colored pencil, gel medium, ink, marker, and watercolor 34.25 x 54.75 inches Cameron Clayborn 8. my granny kept her shotgun bullets in the same shoe box for her Sunday shoes, 2025 34.25 x 54.75 inches Colored pencil, gel medium, ink, marker, photo transfer, and watercolor

Curatorial Statement To live inside a body is to enter into paradox.

The body is a shell and a soul, an archive and an accident. It is where we encounter the world and where the world marks us. At times it is obedient, carrying us without question; at other times it turns, betrays, collapses. Illness enters like a storm, reshaping what it means to be alive. Healing is unruly, immeasurable—found in gestures of care, in collective endurance, in practices that exceed medicine’s reach.

The body is never singular. To live inside of it is to live in transformation. At its smallest scale, it is already a collaboration: life nested inside life, mitochondria passed down through maternal lines, traces of ancient symbiosis living within us still. At its largest, the body is porous, extending into screens and machines, avatars and games, land and love. Here, embodiment takes on other registers—glitching, multiplying, improvising new ways of being, new forms and new freedoms.

About the Artists Cameron Clayborn (b. 1992, Pine Bluff, AR) is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, drawing and performance. Clayborn’s practice is deeply informed by their personal experiences, with much of their work addressing themes of heritage, fragility of memory, grief, and healing.

Clayborn earned their BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and their MFA from the Yale School of Art. Clayborn’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA); Woonhuis (Amsterdam, NL); Gallery 400, University of Illinois Chicago (Chicago, IL); Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, DE); Simone Subal Gallery (New York, NY); Morán Morán (Los Angeles, CA); Chapter NY (New York, NY); Emalin (London, UK); and TONE (Memphis, TN), among others.

As always, there is the question of value: who is protected, who is exposed, whose lives are deemed worthy of mourning. The body becomes a site of politics as much as flesh, carrying histories of precarity and survival, shaping what it means to live in a world that does not fully value humanity.

Body On Me gathers these tensions—the intimacy and estrangement of embodiment, the grief of what the body can no longer hold, the wonder of what it still makes possible. The works within move between the cellular and the cosmic, the personal and the systemic, asking what it means to inhabit a body that is fragile, inventive, and unending. To live inside a body is to dwell inside mystery—an inheritance, a burden, a gift, a question. A dream of being otherwise.

To live inside a body is to dwell inside mystery— an inheritance, a burden, a gift, a question. A dream of being otherwise.

— Kristan Kennedy Their work is in the permanent collections of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (Los Angeles, CA); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, DE); and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, MI). .Compost Cooperative takes the tossed-out leftovers from digital culture and breaks them down to grow a more lush virtual landscape.

In the ease of mass consumption and the gold rush for the supposedly infinite space provided by the Internet, much of our digital infrastructure and the tools used to make it go disconcertingly unexamined. We believe that through cultivating a biome of thoughtful appropriation, re-design, humor, and the surreal we can begin to glimpse a microcosm of new possibility and the recipe to get there. Together we make websites, video games, educational materials, and a range of other media that playfully percolates on our everdecaying/blossoming digital world.

.Compost Cooperative is: Tabitha Nikolai, Myra Lilith Day, garima thakur, Zan Kerrigan, and Carly Barton. Our work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in the Maine College of Art and Design in Maine, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon, and the Utkal University of Culture in Odisha, India.

Vishal Jugdeo (b. 1979, Regina, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist. His work across video, installation, performance, sculpture, and text experiments with narrative, blurring fiction and truth. His artworks emerge from what he considers archive oceans, amassments of intimatelygathered video and sound, often captured with interlocutors he meets during his research in places like Guyana and India, sites of his familial lineage, and Los Angeles, where he lives.

Jugdeo's recent experiments with collaborators working with game-engine software (Miljohn Ruperto, chris velez, and Cielo Saucedo) utilize the technology to imagine an otherwise, in a moment of escalating crisis. Jugdeo is Assistant Professor of New Genres in the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Acknowledgments and Thanks I would like to thank all of the staff at PICA who so thoughtfully and passionately engage in their work in service of artists and audiences. While the entire team has had a hand in making this exhibition possible, I especially want to thank Elio, who works closest with me on planning, and Molly, whose technical expertise is critical to our endeavors—along with Milo, Freddi, Topher, Noah, Irene, John, Alan, Al, and Christian, who lent their time and talent to building the show and executing the artists’ visions.

A special thanks goes to Erté deGarces, who has shaped our exhibitions with design and project management since 2022. Though he is moving on in his work, his contributions and deeply thoughtful ways have left an indelible mark. I also want to acknowledge our former Exhibition Designer, Spencer Byrne-Seres (now of Visitor Projects), who stepped in on this project as a thought partner when I most needed one.

Thank you as well to Sam, Emily, and Jason for their support and finesse, and to Leslie, Jakob, and Jayne for helping the exhibition reach beyond these walls. Deep gratitude to the artists—Vishal, Tabitha, garima, Myra, Zan, and Cameron—for their work is at the heart of this show, to Cielo Saucedo, Emir X. West and Nicolas Burrier for their contributions to Vishal’s work and to Shawné Michaelain Holloway, whose early involvement in the project still resonates.

Finally, I want to recognize the generous collaborators and supporters: Allie Furlotti, Jeanine Jablonski, and Emma Christ of ILY2; Stephanie Snyder and Ido Radon of the Cooley Gallery, Reed College; Nina Amstutz and David Menschel; Jessie Spiess and the team at Infinity Images; Roy Manufacturing; and Steve Knight at CNC Routing.

— Kristan Kennedy

Year-Round PICA Staff

PICA Board

Jakob Dawahare Erin Boberg Doughton Arminda Gandara Molly Gardner Kristan Kennedy Milo Mattern Samantha Ollstein Van Pham Jayne Pugh Elio Quezada Reuben Roqueñi Leslie Vigeant

Nishat Akhtar Pamela Baker-Miller Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. Andrew Dickson Phoebe Ebright bart fitzgerald Allie Furlotti Emily Fusaro Peter Gronquist Shelly Kapoor Stephanie Kelly Shawna Lipton André Middleton Cristi Miles sidony o’neal Kevin Washington

Exhibition Staff Simeen Anjum, Gallery Attendant Noah Beckham, Gallery Attendant Spencer Byrne-Seres/Visitor Projects, Exhibition Designer Alan Cline, Technician Jakob Dawahare, Graphic Designer Erté deGarces, Exhibition Designer Carlin Faucett, Art Transportation John Foster Cartwright, Preparator Molly Gardner, Production Manager Reece Jose, Gallery Attendant Kristan Kennedy, Curator Al Knight-Blaine, Lighting Milo Mattern, Preparator Jason Mitchell, Gallery Attendant Samantha Ollstein, Development Manager and Box Office Manager Christian Orellana Bauer, Preparator Jayne Pugh, Marketing Associate and Editor Elio Quezada, Programs Manager Irene Ramirez, Sign Painter Crimson Ravarra, Gallery Attendant Topher Sinkinson, Preparator Leslie Vigeant, Director of Marketing and Communications Freddi Wyss, Preparator

Special thanks to PICA’s dedicated board members Courtney Dailey and Lynn Bredfeldt Haider, who concluded their board service during the last year.

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