Sightlines 2023

SIGHTLINES 2023

Sightlines is produced by the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts (CCA).

Visual & Critical Studies (VCS) creates an interdisciplinary and culturally diverse framework within which to bring historical, social, and political analysis, as well as formal analysis, to bear on the interpretation of the visual world. VCS trains students to write professionally about the visual arts and visual culture. Students complete coursework followed by the production of a thesis project, leading to the Master of Arts degree.

For more information on the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies at CCA, please contact us:

Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies

California College of the Arts

1111 Eighth Street

San Francisco, CA 94107-2247 USA

Jacqueline Francis, VCS Program Chair, jfrancis@cca.edu

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https://portal.cca.edu/learning/academic-programs/visual-critical-studies-ma/ http://viscrit.cca.edu/

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Design by Kameron Allen, typeset in Power Grotesk Variable by Keston Sieg Hinds Cruz.

© 2023 by California College of the Arts, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any matter without permission.

Introduction

This essay begins with a grateful acknowledgment of the original inhabitants of the land on which Sightlines 2023 has been published.

California College of the Arts (CCA)’s current campus is located in Yelamu, also known as San Francisco—a city on the unceded territory of Ramaytush Ohlone peoples who have lived upon this land since time immemorial. We recognize the historic discrimination and violence inflicted upon Indigenous peoples in California and the Americas, including their forced removal from ancestral lands and the deliberate and systematic destruction of their communities and culture. Land Acknowledgment by itself is a small gesture. It becomes meaningful when coupled with authentic relationships, informed actions, and unyielding commitment to change that improves people’s lives. CCA honors Indigenous peoples—past, present, and future— here and around the world, and we wish to pay respect to local elders.

As the land acknowledgement asserts, place is “about” the physical environment and our engagement with it. We are shaped by places and we transform them, too. CCA was founded in Berkeley in 1907, moved to Oakland’s leafy Rockridge neighborhood in 1922, and opened a San Francisco campus in 1996. In this most recent location, nestled between Potrero Hill and the city’s historical Design District, CCA has watched development along the formerly industrial corridor 16th Street and has been part of it as well. Around our main building (once a Greyhound bus repair shop) are new dormitories, a dining hall, and existing structures converted to administrative offices, exhibition spaces, classrooms, studios, labs, and workshops. Construction on CCA’s “Double Ground”—a cluster of multi-use, duo-level buildings ringing open, green space—is already underway and is scheduled to open next summer. Our residential campus is taking its place next to the University of California-San Francisco’s Medical Center and the Chase Center entertainment arena, extensive projects completed in nearby Mission Bay in recent years. CCA is in the middle of something, an

observable transition in terms of our institutional body, and more broadly, the visual organization of San Francisco.

Placemaking, a term urbanists working in North America started to use in the 1960s, is, of course, an age-old concept that has long mattered to artists, writers, designers, and architects. At CCA, students, faculty, and staff are makers in creative communities—spheres of experimentation and discovery. We seek to respond to contemporary needs and take up activities that contribute to greater good in places where we live alongside others.

The Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies

VCS students are cultural producers who “make” writing. The award-winning VCS faculty guide them. We illuminate paths of interdisciplinary inquiry, and then get out of the way so that students can dive into the histories of visual culture and identify intellectual allies whose scholarship will aid their analyses. VCS students demonstrate their progress in seminar papers, oral presentations, and short-form articles.

The VCS Master of Arts is a two-year commitment. For students who are interested in earning a second terminal master’s degree in Creative Writing, Fine Arts, and Curatorial Practice at CCA, there is the option to pursue their ambition over three years.

For both the MA and the Dual Degree students, the preparation of a Sightlines essay is one of the culminating activities of the VCS program: this writing is drawn from the student’s eight-thousand-word Master of Arts thesis. Students also deliver formal talks about their theses in the annual VCS Spring Symposium. After this preparation, graduating students move on to become arts and college administrators, archivists, critics, curators, editors, educators, grant writers, journalists, and working artists with research-driven practices. Some VCS alumni continue with graduate study, earning doctoral degrees in Visual Studies, Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, Art History, Anthropology, and other humanities disciplines at universities in the US and across the world. The diversity of their routes is a solid measure of their training in visual and critical studies and their desire to use those skills for further inquiry and problem-solving.

The Essays in Sightlines 2023

Sightlines essays are about 2,500 words in length. Each offers an aspect of the writer’s MA thesis—either a summarization of the longer document’s main claims or a single chapter’s argument extracted from it. Sightlines essays appeal to the curious reader who may not have the opportunity to read the entire thesis. Sightlines writers also might circulate their essays as writing samples when they are sharing their research to journal and magazine editors who might publish it, scholarly conference organizers who may invite them to present it, fellowship and residency administrators who fund and otherwise support humanities projects, and admissions committees assessing their applications required for entry into PhD programs.

The three essays in this year’s Sightlines volume are in one way or another about place. As emerging interdisciplinary scholars, the writers engage popular culture, art history, queer studies, ethnobotany, and installation art practices. Even with this range of interests, there are parallels among these projects. Each of the writers trains their attention on the work of a single artist, albeit one who works in collaboration with others. Lastly, they are interested in contemporary visual cultural practices, ones that they look to connect to historical artistic strategies, icons, and rhetorics.

In “Envisioning an Enchanted World: On Christi Belcourt and The Wisdom of the Universe,” Liz Godbey interprets this artist’s revisionary project. A mural-size painting, The Wisdom of the Universe (2014) stands in opposition to the genre of landscape painting and its colonizing views of place. Belcourt’s research-informed, labor intensive practice emphasizes vitality: the spellbinding image of beautifully rendered plants and animals is a message that confirms abundance and balance in nature. Godbey informs us that Belcourt, an award-winning, Métis artist who lives in Canada, also describes herself as a community organizer, land protector, and an advocate for all indigenous people. Belcourt, in all of these roles, presents a model of interconnected and sustainable creativity.

In “Glitched Being,” Alexander Antai Hwang examines Na Mira’s Night Vision (Red as never been), a multi-channel video installation (2022) that was exhibited in the prestigious Whitney Biennial of 2022. Hwang reads Mira’s glitchy representation of the demilitarized zone that separates the nations of North Korea and South Korea as a resonant declaration of cultural

rupture–both the Korean American artist’s and his own as an American of Chinese and Korean heritages. Inspired by Mira’s intention to recover her family history on the Korean peninsula and strike a creative connection to the Korean-born Theresa Hak Yung Cha (1951-1982) as an artistic ancestor, Hwang articulates the desire to address diasporic narratives that are central to his sense of self.

In “Most Campy Objects Are Urban: Transgression in Villano Antillano’s ‘Muñeca’,” Wenmimareba Klobah Collins situates this video made for the rap song of the same name (2021) as an activist anthem of Puerto Rico’s queer community. In the video, Antillano, a non-binary transfemme, moves from the sunny realism of a San Juan street into a shop selling sex toys. The candy-color palette of the establishment’s interiors and the employees’ uniforms match the energy of the track’s thumping beats and the campy wit of its double-entendre lyrics. Klobah Collins explains the transgressions of Muñeca, a Spanish word that translates to “doll” in English: in Puerto Rico, the term has been used to pejoratively label sex workers and to positively describe effeminacy among transgender women. Klobah Collins asserts that Muñeca is an empowering visualization of queer joy and optimism.

VCS proudly publishes the Class of 2023’s powerfully moving writing. Sightlines proffers the writers’ skills and knowledge, and our program’s values as well. Please share it with other readers who are curious about visual and critical studies scholarship, for it is a bold and urgent response to the challenges and opportunities of our times.

Jacqueline Francis, Chair Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies

Envisioning an Enchanted World: On Christi Belcourt and The Wisdom of the Universe

LIZ GODBEY

In the face of increasing climate change and ecological disasters, it is more pressing than ever to confront this force. Contemporary Indigenous artwork like that of Christi Belcourt interrupts colonial ways of looking at the natural world through its visualization of enchanted, abundant, and interconnected world grounded in Indigenous cultural memory and place-based knowledge.

Belcourt is a community organizer, land protector, and advocate for Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island. Belcourt is a Michif (Métis) artist with ancestral ties to Manitou Sakahigan (Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta). Her ancestry also includes Cree, Mohawk, English, French, and Acadian. Her father, Tony Belcourt, is a Métis rights activist and community leader, and her practice continues her father’s activist legacy. A poster series she created with Isaac Murdoch (Ojibwe) is frequently displayed in association with land protection efforts. In 2012, Belcourt codirected the Walking with Our Sisters project, a display of thousands of decorated moccasin tops to commemorate the lives of the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people. Belcourt has become wellknown outside of activist communities and within the “fine” art world as well. She was named the Aboriginal Arts Laureate by the Ontario Arts Council in 2014, and her work is in the collections of galleries across what is known as Canada. Perhaps her most well-known and celebrated works are her beadwork-style paintings. Georgia Phillips-Amos writes the following about one of these works:

Belcourt celebrates nature’s profusion in detail. Articulated in thousands of dots . . . her paintings are so intricate they might be mistaken for tapestries. A dab of paint, like a stitch of thread, could be subsumed by the whole . . . but Belcourt’s touch insists we see the vibrancy of the ruby-red feathers at

An extractive capitalist worldview has become a dominant force in the cultural imagination of what is commonly referred to as North America.

a hummingbird’s throat or the fine veins of an oak leaf. Leaving the gallery, my eyes feel keen to see the city differently. Scanning for abundance, my gaze settles on a nearby staghorn sumac, whose crimson berry clusters are as opulent as wet paint.1

In their review, Phillips-Amos points to the potential and powerful impact of Belcourt’s paintings, in which the viewer becomes enchanted by the work and carries this out beyond the gallery walls.

Enchantment is characterized by wonder that is located in the body and soul, a wonder that goes beyond theorizing, conceptualizing, or critiquing. To be enchanted is to become spellbound and to feel a “temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement.” 2 It is a way of

Figure 1. Christi Belcourt, The Wisdom of the Universe, 2014. Acrylic on canvas, 67 x 111 in. (171 × 282 cm). Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Purchased with funds donated by Greg Latremoille; © Christi Belcourt.

1 Georgia Phillips-Amos, “Christi Belcourt at Art Gallery of Guelph,” Artforum September 14, 2020, https://www.artforum.com/picks/christi-belcourt-83914.

2 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 5.

approaching the world that reminds one of the marvelous specificity of things 3 Enchantment requires “a cultivated form of perception, a discerning and meticulous attentiveness to the singular specificity of things.”4 Enchantment allows us to become attuned to the world around us. As we are enchanted, we are put under a spell of the world and are reminded that we are inextricably and joyfully bound to nature, physically and spiritually. 5 Western knowledge traditions are characterized by a mechanical worldview. As Vine Deloria Jr. (Lakota) explains, “The mechanistic worldview continues to be applied to many of the physical sciences and biology and . . . very quickly results in a methodology that is essentially dissective in character.” 6 Natasha Myers, a professor of anthropology and researcher of plant sensing and communication, speaks of the connection between mechanization and disenchantment:

By turning the living world into a machine, we’ve actually set it up to work for us . . . we’ve created a context in which we can deploy plants and organisms, molecules and other things in our service. We can run them like machines. . . . And so I think we can challenge [this] in really powerful ways by participating actively in the work of refusing to disenchant the living world . . . it could really radically change our relationship to plants as we expand our sensibilities for their forms of sentience, their intelligences, their knowledge, their ways of being.7

Perhaps the most enchanting of Belcourt’s works is the mural-scaled painting

The Wisdom of the Universe (2014; fig. 1 ), which measures 67 by 111 inches. The painting was originally commissioned by the Art Gallery of Ontario. Recently it was exhibited in Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, a 2019–2021 exhibition organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art

3 Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life 4.

4 Bennet, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 37.

5 Bennett further defines enchantment: “A surprising encounter, a meeting with something that you did not expect and are not fully prepared to engage. Contained within this surprise state are (1) a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter and (2) a more unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition. The overall effect of enchantment is a mood of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness, a sense of having had one’s nerves or circulation or concentration powers tuned up or recharged—a shot in the arm, a fleeting return to childlike excitement about life. Historians Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park note that, in early modern Europe, the terms for wonder and wonders—admiratio, mirabilia, miracula—‘seem to have their roots in an Indo-European word for “smile.”’”

6 Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel R Wildcat, Power and Place: Indian Education in America (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Pub., 2001), 11–12.

7 Ayana Young and Natasha Myers, “Dr. Natasha Myers on Growing the Planthroposcene,” October 14, 2020, in For the Wild Podcast MP3 audio, 1:07:13, https://forthewild.world/listen/dr-natasha-myers-on-growing-the-planthroposcene-204.

that traveled to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among other venues. A close look at Belcourt’s The Wisdom of the Universe reveals thousands of individually painted dots, 8 slightly raised off the canvas, resembling beads. The beadwork that Belcourt emulates is characteristic of the beadwork of Métis communities. 9 As Susan D. Dion explains in her book Braided Learning: Illuminating Indigenous Presence through Art and Story, “Beading tells the story of colonialism: beads were used for trade, introducing questions about the economic relationship between Indigenous people and fur traders.” 10 European seed beads proved to be a labor-saving material in comparison to the quills used in quillwork, another major practice of textile embellishment that was in practice for hundreds of years before European contact. Embroidery thread was also a European trade good, and with it came foreign designs. Although partially inspired by European craft and materials, Native beadwork is its own unique art form. It is characteristic of many Native communities around the Great Lakes and is often seen on regalia, cradleboards, moccasins, blankets, jackets, and earrings. Métis and Anishinaabe beadwork is also defined by its representation of the region’s life-forms. Elder Rose Richardson explains, “Stories and knowledge were beaded or embroidered into clothing and items of everyday use. As [our ancestors] drew the design, they told the story of the plant.” 11 Beading is not only decorative but also serves to preserve knowledge of different species and as a mapping of the natural world.

Belcourt’s painting process, which involves her slowly adding thousands of dots to the canvas, takes months. As she works on it day after day, the process becomes a ritual for her. This abundance of dots is assembled to represent full living beings. The Wisdom of the Universe’s pictorial plane is full and alive. Belcourt includes classic motifs of indigenous plants, medicines, and animals—strawberries, blueberries, hummingbirds. All plant parts are included—leaves, buds, flowers, tendrils, roots. As typical in beadwork, the background is a single color: the black in this painting is reminiscent of the velvet traditionally used by Métis beadworkers. As is typical of beadwork patterns, Belcourt’s beaded imagery is nearly symmetrical, with the plants and birds on one side mirrored on the other. This symmetry implies a sense of balance and harmony that is found in a healthy and thriving ecosystem.

8 In describing My Heart is Beautiful , a painting by Belcourt of similar size and content, the artist notes that the work is made up of around 250,000 dots.

9 Métis communities themselves are nations created from Anishinaabe and European unions.

10 Susan D. Dion, Braided Learning: Illuminating Indigenous Presence through Art and Story (Vancouver, BC: Purich Books, 2022), 114.

11 Christi Belcourt, Medicines to Help Us: Traditional Métis Plant Use (Saskatoon, SK: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2007).

Belcourt’s botanical, aviary, and insectile imagery reflects her ties to a specific place and a deep understanding of the relationships within that place. This painting, housed at a museum in Toronto, exists on Mississauga, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat land. In her artist statement, Belcourt writes that many of the beings depicted in her painting are not just local to Toronto but also designated as extinct, threatened, or endangered in Ontario. They include the spring blue-eyed Mary, the dwarf lake iris, the eastern prairie fringed orchid, the Karner blue butterfly, the West Virginia white butterfly, and the cerulean warbler (there are also other beings pictured whose populations are stable, like the mourning dove). The representations of the endangered beings in this visual Indigenous context connect their status as endangered or threatened to the larger effects of settler colonialism and extractive capitalism. Habitats are in danger and being destroyed due to residential or other land development, the introduction of invasive species, forestry, rampant deforestation, and misguided wildfire suppression efforts.

Belcourt’s paintings are also characterized by an aesthetic of abundance. I take the phrase “an aesthetic of abundance” from an essay in the Hearts of Our People exhibition catalogue. In the essay in which Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips write that “an aesthetic of abundance—in expenditures of time, materials, and generosity to others—has characterized Native women’s arts across the generations,” 12 offering examples of extravagantly crafted gifts, like beaded garments or cradleboards using floral patterns. This aesthetic of abundance is in contrast to a capitalist society that encourages productivity and efficiency and relies on the myth of scarcity to sustain itself.

The Wisdom of the Universe reminds the viewer of the interconnectedness of all life on the planet. Nearly everything in the world of Belcourt’s painting is interconnected, with most of the plants and medicines sharing roots, branches, and stems. The plants, animals, and insects interact. Take, for example, the cocoon hanging from a branch or the hummingbirds drinking from the flowers. She depicts a whole ecological world: a dove, robins, hummingbirds, moths, caterpillars, cocoons, butterflies, oak leaves and acorns, irises, warblers, and a further multitude of flowering and nonflowering plants. They are intricately crafted—care is given to each tiny bud,

12 Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, “‘Encircles Everything’: A Transformative History of Native Women’s Arts,” in Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, eds. Jill Ahlberg Yohe et al., exh. cat. (Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art, in association with the University of Washington Press, 2020), 60.

thorn, and tendril—each one its own marvelously specific species, as made clear through the artist’s choices regarding their shape, number, color, size, and location in the image.

Belcourt’s painting also implicates the viewer in the vibrant ecological life systems it depicts. Enchanted by the painting, the viewer is connected both to the ecosystem they are viewing and to their experiences of nature outside the gallery space. The scale of the world is so large and full of life that the viewer may realize their own involvement in the same living ecosystem of relations.

Settler colonialism, Western science, and land cultivation are intimately entangled, and their histories are similarly intertwined—they can be fully understood only in relation to one another. The field of botany emerged from this entanglement, which is dependent upon extraction and erasure and helped enable the expansion of European empires. Botany developed due to colonial projects and exploratory voyages around the world that sought new specimens to be collected, hybridized, and turned into profit through the processing or selling of raw materials. This discipline is also centered on European practices of classification and taxonomy, systems that attempt to differentiate, name, and hierarchically order species by visual markers—a practice extended to include the development of scientific racism and the creation of categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Moreover, European botanists renamed Native plants in Latin or after themselves or other non-Native botanists. Local names were erased, as local knowledge was extracted and exploited. In tracing the history of colonial botany, Londa L. Schiebinger and Claudia Swan write that “the story of colonial botany is as much a story of transplanting nature as it is one of transforming knowledge.” 13 The accumulation of specimens was accompanied by a substantial visual record in the form of botanical drawing.

Christopher Parsons has detailed some of the early practices of European botany, specifically French botany, in what is frequently referred to as Canada. Parsons explains how French colonialists conceived of the land in a way that ignored Indigenous claims to and knowledge of the land. In his book A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America, Parsons devotes a chapter to ginseng, explaining how this plant was already well-known to the nations of Iroquois south of Montreal when

13 Londa L. Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World , first paperback ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

French missionary and ethnologist Joseph-François Lafitau falsely claimed to have ‘discovered’ ginseng there.14 Compared to the depictions of plant life in Belcourt’s paintings, Lafitau’s drawing of a single root appears lifeless (fig. 2). The plant is displayed dissected and alone. The individual parts of the plant are all there, but they are separated and individualized. There is no sense as to how this plant exists in the ground or how it interacts with other life. In contrast, Belcourt does not see roots as individualized but

14 Christopher M. Parsons, A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Figure 2. Joseph-François Lafitau, “L’aureliana de Canada, en chinois gin-seng, en iroquois garent-oguen,” in Mémoire . . . concernant la précieuse plante du gin-seng (Paris: Chez Joseph Mongé: 1718), 1718.

quite the opposite (fig. 3). She states that in her painting “the roots are exposed to signify that all life needs nurturing from the earth to survive and represent the idea that there is more to life than what is seen on the surface. Additionally, it represents the great influence our heritage has on us as individuals.” 15

Western botany aims to dissect, divide, and disconnect. Reflecting on her study of botany in college, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide. But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer.” 16 This separation and disconnection between observer and observed is present not only in Western science but also in Western art.

Through their size, horizontal orientation, and content, Belcourt’s beadwork paintings exist in conversation with Euro-American landscape painting. Her work disrupts colonial discourses on landscape, notions of the sublime, and the exaltation of the disembodied or disconnected eye. Belcourt’s work is flat, in terms of perspective, which has the effect of equalizing the visual field; nothing is foregrounded or sent to the background, except maybe the variably sized glowing yellow dots, perhaps representing stars or spirits. Again, this is how beadwork patterns appear, in two dimensions, which is also reminiscent of Woodland style art.17 However, European landscape painting traditions abide by Cartesian perspectivalism, which depicts the world three-dimensionally, as through the gaze of the eye. This perspective, to quote Martin Jay, “privilege[s] an ahistorical, disinterested, disembodied subject outside of the world it claims to know only from afar.” 18 Jay writes, “Cartesian perspectivalism was thus in league with a scientific worldview that . . . saw [the world] as situated in a mathematically regular spatio-temporal order.”19 The flatness of Belcourt’s painting is a flattening or condensing of time and space that contradicts this idea of “mathematically regular spatio-temporal order.” All these plants and animals could exist in a single area, but they might not be present or close together at the same moment in time. One would have to look, listen, and feel closely and slowly over a long duration to notice all of these different organisms.

15 Christi Belcourt, “Metis Artist Christi Belcourt Discusses Painting ‘My Heart is Beautiful’.mov,” May 5, 2012, YouTube video, 11:04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwNHNm9dw6Y&ab_channel=ChristiBelcourt.

16 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 42.

17 Woodland art is a Native art style characterized by flat perspective, bright color, and bold black lines that was founded by Norval Morrisseau, an Ojibwe artist, in the 1960s. Notably, Morrisseau’s painting The Great Flood (1975) is hung across from Belcourt’s The Wisdom of the Universe at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

18 Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality ed. Hal Foster, Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 2 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 10.

19 Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 9.

Belcourt’s work depicts an enchanted world—a world that refuses to be disenchanted, to be mechanized and separated. The Wisdom of the Universe presents an interconnected world of more-than-human life characterized by an aesthetic of abundance. The numerous and various plants are vibrantly colored and crafted through the artist’s slow process of painting individual dots, which echo the art of Métis beadworkers. While translating beadwork patterns into a painted format, Belcourt retains the sensibilities of the beadwork that inspires her. She demonstrates how nature is not static or separated but complex and always in flux. Belcourt states that she intends to “offer a counter-balance to the overwhelming negative forces of destruction, despair, violence, and death to which we are exposed daily. I want to offer respite for tired eyes and weary minds.” Informed by a traditionally Indigenous perspective on land, Belcourt’s work not only shows us the beauty of the world but reminds us how to be in the world.

Figure 3. Christi Belcourt, The Wisdom of the Universe (detail), 2014; © Christi Belcourt.

Glitched Being

ALEXANDER ANTAI HWANG

I first encountered Na Mira’s Night Vision (Red as never been) (2022) in the summer of 2022 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as part of the Whitney Biennial. It was enshrouded in black curtains in the back corner of the sixth floor, and so it was the white noise and grainy voices that first drew me to the piece.

They were familiar but just out of reach, as if they were calling me in closer. Entranced, I entered through the opening in the curtains. I was barraged by a flurry of flashing images and chaotic sounds. Disoriented, I could not grasp the glitched video or the eerie audio. There was a video playing of a person crawling around on all fours with their face hidden behind long black hair. The figure was present but fleeting. The footage kept cutting back and forth in time. I wandered around for a place to ground myself, but multiple channels of video kept cutting in and out, overlapping and slipping away from me. Eventually, I surrendered myself to the corner and took a seat on the ground. Echoes of rupture reverberated into the present. The past refused to remain dormant.

A few days earlier, I had been with my family for my younger brother’s graduation in unceded land of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, also known as Poughkeepsie, New York. Traveling across the country from California with my family meant a lot of time in the same space with my dad. Many times, I was the body onto which he projected all of his anger and fear. The only way he could express his own frustrations with the world, which surely dealt him a shitty hand, was to use his violence. But holding the weight of his trauma and grief as well as my own was too much. The night before the graduation ceremony, we pulled into the parking lot of the local Puerto Rican restaurant where we had made plans for dinner. I can’t even remember what set him off, but I do remember the

look on his face while he was yelling at me. It was an all too familiar sight of rage that took me back to my childhood self. So I screamed back, “Maybe we should fight. . . . It looks like you want to hit me, so you should just hit me!” My mother eventually settled us down, and we got on with the night. But I became stuck in that moment. It refused to pass from me. That image of his eyes, hot with anger, replayed over and over in my head. I realized I had no better way of dealing with my own anger and sadness. I was stuck in a cycle of trauma and silence.

A glitch is a sudden irregularity or malfunction of a computer’s circuitry sometimes caused by a surge of electricity. The term stems from the Yiddish word glitsh, meaning “slippery place,” and glitshn, which means “to slide or glide.” It is an instability. Pixels and frames are moved around, restructured by the rupture within the circuitry. It is aberrant. In the case of Night Vision (Red as never been), the glitch reorders the frames that make up the moving image. Past footage constantly leaks into the future and flashes into the present frame. Is there a connection between this glitch and the experience of the Korean diaspora? Crossing the Pacific Ocean to a new country with a different language, a place with a deep history of racial violence and white supremacy, is a glitched experience. Many Koreans arrived in this country after the Korean War in hopes of escaping their devastated homeland. In the “land of opportunity,” perhaps Koreans could move on from the war that took so much from them. Yet the violence of the past ruptures into the present.

Through its nonlinear form, resulting from the glitch in the camera, Mira’s work refuses the aesthetics of the Authorized modality of information. It bastardizes the “proper” visual syntax of Authority, thus generating a new counterorder. In his essay “The Right to Look,” Nicholas Mirzoeff defines a complex of visuality as a system that classifies, separates, and aestheticizes such categorizations as natural or truthful.1 It is the process through which Authority justifies its position at the top of the knowledge-production hierarchy, appointing itself the most proper and sensible mediator of information. The legitimacy of Authorized visual images stems from their supposedly transcendent capability to represent reality as it “really happens.” But time does not happen in a straight line. It constantly loops, re-loops, and intertwines past and present.

1 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 476, https://doi.org/10.1086/659354.

Na Mira is a conceptual artist based out of unceded Tongva, Gabrielino, Kizh, and Chumash lands, also known as Los Angeles. As a child, Mira grew up in both America and East Asia, moving from country to country. Motion (and the control of motion) is a common theme in Mira’s Korean lineage. She explains that Night Vision (Red as never been) was partly inspired by two family stories of “transgression spanning a century: my great-grandmother, who lived as a shaman under the Japanese Occupation,” when the practice was outlawed, “and my uncle, who drove his motorcycle across the 38th parallel [the DMZ] to North Korea in the 1990s.”2 These acts of movement through traumatic ruptures refuse hegemonic boundaries that aim to separate people in space and time. In banning the practice of Korean shamanism during its colonization of Korea, Japan intended to erase Koreans’ ties with their ancestral lineage. The DMZ, short for the Demilitarized Zone, is the border between South and North Korea located at thirty-eight degrees above the equator. It also cut ties between people, separating those in North Korea from those in South Korea. Whereas the motions of certain bodies are deemed appropriate and acceptable, as Legacy Russell asserts in her book Glitch Feminism, “glitched bodies—those that do not align with the canon of white cisgender heteronormativity—pose a threat to social order. Range-full and vast, they cannot be programmed.”3 Night Vision (Red as never been) enshrines motion for its possibilities of an alternative understanding of the past and thus of the future. It uses the glitch as an act of transgressive motion to expand our understanding of the self as a multiplicity unbound by national borders, the body, or time.

Scenes flash at a rapid pace. It seems like you can register them only after they disappear from the screen and have been replaced by the following image. The moving image becomes two when it’s projected on and through the plexiglass. One image is contained within the plexiglass, while the other beams through and onto the screens behind. The latter projection, however, hits the screens off-center, causing the lower half of the image, which includes Mira’s body, to be projected onto the floor. Mira appears on all fours, low to the ground. She moves slowly with intention, like a tiger on the hunt. Her long black hair falls over her face and onto the ground. Two white tourists come over to investigate. One leans down and asks her a question. She does not look up. Are they simply curious about

her performance? Maybe they are more concerned than curious. Their investigation echoes the ways in which bodies, specifically Korean bodies, have been controlled and disciplined. As Russell notes, there is movement that is deemed good and lawful. Other movements are deemed dangerous. The scratchy white-noise audio accompanying the video slowly transitions into a discernible sound: Faith Evans in P. Diddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You.” The lyrics “every breath you take, every move you make, I’ll be missing you,” combined with footage of the DMZ, an imperialist site of separation and rupture, recall the separated friends, family, and loved ones who have been missing each other for decades on end. Mira confronts the borders that dictate her body by transgressing the borders that govern the movement of her Korean body.

Figure 1. Na Mira, Night Vision (Red as never been) (18:59), 2022; three-channel infrared HD video, color, sound, holographic plexiglass; overall duration: 24:44 min. Installed at the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy the artist and Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles.

However, instead of approaching the DMZ as solely an embodiment of US imperialism and surveillance, Mira uses the space as a place for remembrance. Mira’s great-grandmother, a Korean shaman, might have enacted a similar performance in her lifetime. The tiger is one of the gods in Korean shamanism. All the while, the camera’s glitch superimposes Mira’s body onto the concrete tiled floor of the DMZ lookout and the DMZ itself. Then the two screens unleash a flurry of glitched footage. The projection continues to beam through and onto the holographic plexiglass, creating four channels of video layered onto each other (fig. 1). All the channels are from the same source footage, yet they are offset. Either lagging behind or playing ahead of one another, the images fragment and break the DMZ. The flashing images of Mira and other scenes of the DMZ transpose the relationship between them, placing her body on top of the DMZ footage. She transgresses the imperialist border through the movement of the glitch, as she reenacts the movements of her ancestor.

Mira also uses the glitch to address the memory and presence of another ancestor, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. During her time in Berkeley, doing research for another project, Mira developed an intimate connection with the Korean American artist archive at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). There she was exposed to the work of Cha, an avant-garde visual artist who grew up in the Bay Area and studied at UC Berkeley. Tragically, in 1982, at the age of thirty-one, Cha was raped and murdered in New York City. Just as her career was beginning to take off and her now famous book Dictée (1982) was published, she died. At the time of her death, Cha was still working on other pieces, including a video work by the name of White Dust from Mongolia (1980–). At the fifteen-minute mark of Night Vision (Red as never been), the projector plays red-tinted footage filmed on a city block, documenting a performance by Mira outside of the Puck Building, in New York City, the site of Cha’s death. Mira appears dressed in a large robe and holding a socket mirror in each hand. Directing the mirrors outward, toward the building, she moves around, orienting herself in different ways in relation to the building. Then the right screen turns on. Mira, donning white gloves, stands in front of a large screen displaying a still of railroad tracks from Cha’s unfinished White Dust from Mongolia It is the final scene of the video. The footage is from Mira’s Tesseract

(test) (2021), which was part of experimental art institution The Kitchen’s ongoing research project into the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha archive. Mira moves around in front of the screen, while the glitch flashes her body from one position to the next. An up-close image of the white gloves also flashes intermittently. The two scenes combined form Mira’s enactment of White Dust from Mongolia’s final scene. In of Cha’s writings about the piece, she “proposes two narrators, one in the past who is trying to remember and a second in the present who is trying to remember. Throughout the piece the two points move towards each other eventually to one complete superimposition,” writes Mira.4 Working in the present, Mira merges with Cha through time and space. Her automatic writing in this scene is structured by this call and response (fig. 2). Mira wrote the words in the parentheses with her left hand and answered with her right hand:

(if I perform Cha’s final scene?) Tesseract Pulse Spools Time Mendable Nascent

(how do the two selves meet?) Tail Samsara 5

The words bring into question the notion of a singular self in a singular time. Glitched time allows Mira’s selves—her primary self and herself in relation to Cha—to meet. Our ancestors are still within us.

How can I exist within and through disruptions? Growing up, I was faced with many challenges that always seemed to be so much bigger than me. Indeed, as I uncover my own story and the story of my family, I am connecting the greater forces of US imperialism and racism with my personal experiences. The violence inflicted upon me and so many of my fellow Korean people is not something that can be separated from us. Mira’s video shows us that the violence of our present times is inextricably bound with the past. So even though I felt alone in my hurt for so long, as I move through time and space, I am learning that I am not alone. In connecting with my ancestors, Na Mira, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, I amplify their energy and strength to create new selves within me and with others that transgress the borders of violence that have held me in for so long.

4 Na Mira, “Na Mira: Passages Paysages Passengers,” Video Viewing Room, The Kitchen OnScreen, accessed October 3, 2022, https://onscreen.thekitchen.org/media/na-mira.

5 Na Mira, Night Vision (Red as never been) 2022; three-channel infrared HD video, color, sound, and holographic plexiglass; duration: 24:44 min. Courtesy of the artist and Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles.

Figure 2. Na Mira, Night Vision (Red as never been) (14:33), 2022. Installed at the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy the artist and Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles.

Most Campy Objects Are Urban: Transgression in Villano Antillano’s “Muñeca”

WENMIMAREBA KLOBAH COLLINS

June 2021: The tarmac burns the soles of our islander feet. We swarm the beaches. Pride month energizes the humid Puerto Rican breeze, and we are frenetic for the next big musical hit—for the next temázo to sweep our airwaves. Enter nonbinary transfemme Puerto Rican artist Villano Antillano. Syn-co-pa-ted beats rumble and chime. The third beat slurs across the pentagram with an imperfect, sensuous drag. The note quivers, as if caught between two noises, as if tripping and stumbling forward. The treble soars on its uncanny, unique structure. And, over it all, Villano’s rapped flow beckons us. The body responds: breath and heart rate juddering and swaying alongside the rhythms—reoriented and diverted from “normative” cycles into a wholly queer way of understanding time. We are interpellated into a feeling that may be conducive to an alternate way of navigating the world. Suddenly, it is summer. Suddenly, we have our anthem.

la muñeca

Villano Antillano rose to prominence in the local Puerto Rican Urban music scene in 2018. As of 2022, her discography consists of one album and eighteen singles. Her music has been described as having the “powerful and aggressive” rhythmic attributes of rap, trap, reggaeton, and electronica.1 Most of her collaborations have been with fellow queer, female artists like Ana Macho, Tokischa, Young Miko, or Paopao. Despite being an emerging artist in the Urban scene, Villano has been making large strides forward toward infusing the genre with a queer sensibility.

Villano’s polyvalent expressive practice transgresses the sonic, visual, and social traditions of the Urban Puerto Rican musical scene through campiness, friction, and blatant sexuality. Her usage of playful lyricism,

1 “Quién es Villano Antillano, la Primera Artista Transfemenina que Colaboró con BZRP,” Infobae, June 9, 2022, https://www.infobae.com/america/entretenimiento/2022/06/09/quien-es-villano-antillano-la-primeraartista-transfemenina-que-colaboro-con-bzrp/.

no soy una chica normal, todo’ saben que yo soy una muñeca

imagery, and uninhibited transfemme subjectivity moves through Urban Latinx traditions with a keen, self-assessing authority. She is both within the conventions and outside of them. She reproduces imaginaries regarding trans women while parodying them with Caribbean campiness. Her artistic practice disrupts the public sphere and acts with agency—proclaiming transness as an embodied resource for knowledge through experiences of love, sex, joy, humor, grief, strength, and solidarity. She moves us, bodily, to the friction of el perreo, el jolgorio, or la jayaera.

Villano herself sees her artistry as part of a tradition of activism: “I feel like trap and rap are weapons in social movements. If you look back, those artists have been agents of change in social movements. Rap is a weapon of consciousness. To occupy the space for me is activism and representation.”2 Underground music—now including rap, reggaeton, and trap—is the avenue through which socially disenfranchised artists are able to speak truth to their experiences and insert their subjectivities into a broader, often hostile, site of cultural discourse.

In the case of her 2021 single “Muñeca,”3 Villano uses rap to center the experiences and aesthetics of transfemme people. As described in the official music video for the single, muñeca is a term used in the Caribbean and Latin America to refer to a certain kind of trans woman. The term doll has likewise been a popular moniker within Anglophone circles of trans women to refer to particularly beautiful, effeminate trans women. In this sense, muñeca is used to indicate levels of “passability” within cisheterosexual standards of femininity. In Spanish, the term carries an additional connotation associated with sex work. Yet terms used as pejorative signifiers within dominant linguistic norms can be reclaimed by groups who are subjected to verbal brutalization. Naming folds itself into a variety of mobilization and agency strategies regarding identity. Through playing on the image and idea of the muñeca, Villano self-reflexively challenges the imaginaries that exist in Puerto Rican society regarding trans women/folks while also pointing to the different ways that she and, more broadly, trans women perform labor (including, but not limited to, sex work).

Not only does Villano eschew any presumptions about what a woman is or is not—what a trans woman is or is not—but she also refuses to be “clocked,” or made legible in any way by the cisheteronormative public. In

2 Lucas Villa, “Villano Antillano Is Claiming Her Space In Latin Rap,” MTV News June 23, 2021, https://www.mtv.com/news/odu427/villano-antillano-interview-muneca.

3 Villano Antillano, “Villano Antillano x Ana Macho - Muñeca (Video Oficial),” June 17, 2021, YouTube video, 3:10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10-zLAMI1EE.

her song, Villano very proudly announces, “No me interesa ser una mujer / porque creo y entiendo que represento a la mujer / con el mayor de lo’ respetos / no quiero ser una mujer más / quiero ser una trans diferente”

[I’m not interested in being a woman / because I believe and understand that I represent womanhood / respectfully / I don’t want to be one more woman / I want to be a different trans person].

ya tengo la tiara como Plastique

After the opening title card of the video for “Muñeca,” we quite literally watch Villano clock in to work. In this moment, the grit of the street is left behind in favor of the high saturation of the interior of the corner store— children’s toys and sex toys intermingle on the shelves; glitter and sequins call to the viewer. When Villano steps across this threshold in the music video, we are invited into a speculative world that celebrates the transgressive potential within queer futurity, joy, community, and optimism. This moment of trans-lation across space is the trans-gression of space. Trans, from Latin as prefix, meaning “across, beyond, through, on the other side of.” Gradi “to walk, step, go,” or even “to wander” amongst the bodies that surround you.4 Through them. As them. On the dance floor, listening queerly, I am trans because I am already beside myself—euphoric and undone— beyond the boundaries of myself. When we transgress—from the Latin verb transgredi, meaning to “step across”—we are already on the other side of definition. Instead, we are mired in the site of potentiality.

This doorway is an invitation into the colorful boudoir where the viewers look over the shoulders of a carousel of customers and meet the smirking, unwavering gazes of a cast of transfemme folks behind the counter. This indoor space is a world of desire, gender, and exaggeration. The abundance of playful objects and saturated colors is an instant indicator that we are in Villano’s queer world, which is both speculative and referential to the realities that trans women face in the labor market. Yet the framework of the whole narrative is decidedly comical—we are invited to laugh at exaggeration and ridiculousness, but the trans women are not the victims of the joke. Instead, we are enthralled and compelled by means of campy aesthetics. We are invited to be delighted.

Etymonline.com s.v. “Transgress,” accessed October 19, 2022, https://www.etymonline.com/word/ transgress.

Wenmimareba Klobah Collins

Scholar José Esteban Muñoz makes a case for queer aesthetics as the doorway to “a kind of potentiality that is open, indeterminate, like the affective contours of hope itself.”5 This potentiality is articulated as “indispensable to the act of imaging transformation,” as it provides us with the opportunity to “glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic.” 6 However, as a form of queer parody, camp extends beyond the aesthetic. Camp can be harnessed as a political tactic or strategy of resistance that imbues signifiers with new meaning and exposes the inherent artifice and contrived nature of dominant ideology.7

Villano’s concern with the ornamental is notable by means of the high level of self-adornment, accessorization, and decoration in her music video. She is also thinking about how aestheticization aligns with the kind of life and world she wants to inhabit:

As queer people, I feel like we have to work extra hard to have happy lives. A lot of times, our lives are a constant choosing of, ‘OK, I’m going to be happy, despite everything.’ I like literature a lot too, and magical realism—how sometimes we can decorate reality with fictitious or fantasy elements in order to make it prettier. I feel like I do that a lot with my music because I do it with my life. 8

Aesthetics, for Villano, is inherently linked to creating “happy lives.” This quote also allows us to see how she is engaging with multi-genre Latin American traditions of exploring a speculative worldview.

Todo’ dicen que me veo enticing

Shortly after Villano enters the building, we see her working behind the counter with other employees, all dressed in similar uniforms (fig. 1). The muñecas of this video bring to mind sexy, coy candy-shop workers, baby dolls, drive-in roller skaters, or maids. The design of the uniform flounces through the lurid landscapes of fetish and fantasy, making it difficult to align it with one specific referent. The viewer is made all the more aware of their own biases or referents. The uniforms do not instruct or make

5 José Esteban Muñoz, “Introduction: Feeling Utopia,” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 7.

6 Muñoz, “Introduction: Feeling Utopia,” 7.

7 Moe Meyer, The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 3.

8 Jhoni Jackson, “Villano Antillano Isn’t Looking For Acceptance—Nor Fitting Into Your Conventions of Gender Identity,” REMEZCLA, June 22, 2021, https://remezcla.com/features/music/villano-antillano-muneca-trans-representation-music-interview/.

Figure 1a. Villano Antillano, “Muñeca”, 2021 (still). Music video, with sound; duration: 3:10 min.

Figure 1b. Villano Antillano, “Muñeca”, 2021 (still). Music video, with sound; duration: 3:10 min.

assertions about what a “positive or productive representation” of transfemininity constitutes. Instead, they become fixed as a signal toward historical attempts to reify the appropriate boundaries for the female body. However, the uniform is also another way to establish a new form of sociality within the music video. When Villano enters the shop, she joins a community of women who are visually equalized. Instead of having a homogenizing effect, the similarity of the uniforms imbues all of the transfemme employees with equal importance. The camera never once deviates from capturing the joy, play, and care that the women behind the counter offer each other.

It must be noted that despite formal moves to enfold or invite transfemmes into the music video, Villano and fellow “Muñeca” collaborator Ana Macho are some of the lightest-skinned femmes on-screen. Both artists have been vocal about their experiences with poverty and the lack of accessibility within the industry, but their proximity to whiteness and

Figure 2. Villano Antillano, “Muñeca”, 2021 (still). Music video, with sound; duration: 3:10 min.

normative beauty standards may have a role in their burgeoning commercial success. It is additionally unclear if the collaborative message espoused on screen reflects the dynamics during production. The director and producer of the music video may have had a significant sway over its development. One would hope that the behind-the-scenes ambiance was one of equal collaboration and perhaps even inclusion of emerging queer artists.

A key frame that activates campiness, queerness, and humor is in the instance of the shrine to the horniest employee of the month (0:37–0:36). This moment from the music video, with all of its visual richness, excess, extravagance, and careful aesthetic arrangement is one of the moments where I see Villano’s interjection of queer subjectivity into Urban culture made startlingly clear. “Bellaca del mes” is a whimsical play on words that examines the corporate trope of “employee of the month” in light of sex work. The spectacle of enshrining the employee of the month is re-created (fig. 2). Each of the objects arranged in this scene exude an artificiality inherent to their form, again pointing to the visual code of camp. The gaudy cheapness of the clutch purse and fan, for example, calls back to a refined brand of traditional femininity whose legacy lingers in the Puerto Rican imaginary. The aesthetic preoccupations of the music video function as part of an intellectual exercise that considers the social constructions of the feminine.

Additionally, in the video for “Muñeca” the plastic gun is both innuendo and impotent threat. The repeated motif of plasticity, of empty and benign promise, has implications that extend into the realm of performativity. On one level, these plastic guns put Urban artists in their viewfinder and call out their self-fabrications—their mythologizations as part of their street cred. On another level, these guns are also symbols that, in their translucent plasticity, shine light through the banality of violence—violence used to further self-fashioning, violence aimed at and concentrated within disenfranchised communities. Lastly, they may promise and advocate for self-defense, or even empowerment, within a cultural context of heightened anti-trans legislation and hostility.

Yo soy la arma letal, yo soy la femme fatale

Empujo lo’ botone’, yo me atrevo

As articulated in both the song and the video, “Muñeca” invites us into an imaginative process. Villano explores ideas of perception and identity by teasing, questioning, and undoing the linguistic and visual semiotic frameworks that dominate the public sphere. “Muñeca” harnesses the camp aesthetic as a strategy of transgressive humor that exposes the arbitrary, artificial nature of the social rules, conventions, and power structures that underlie our different forms of sociality. Aesthetics merge with lyricism and provide further insight into issues such as labor, gun violence, sexuality, gender, and the very culture of Urban music or musicians. “Muñeca” proudly argues for a broadened horizon of livability, self-fashioning, futurity, and agency for transfemmes.

In the world of “Muñeca,” ambiguity is not only normalized but actively welcomed. The lyrical form of rap embraces multiple meanings in one verse and facilitates an expansive, sometimes playful way of articulating the many nuances of gender, desire, and sexuality. Even Villano’s employment of musical conceits like syncopation can serve as an aperture into alternative ways of registering and inhabiting the world. That disruptive metric is “the point from which the world unfolds: the ‘here’ of the body, and the ‘where of its dwelling.’” 9 Being removed from time, dizzied within the conventions of the pentagram, not only makes demands of our musical intelligence, but it also formally contributes to the production of new “conceptions of space” 10 and temporality.

As a case study, “Muñeca” makes evident the larger trends in the production of cultural objects (specifically Urban music) where appropriations, samplings, and reorientations are abundant. These trends complicate the notion of fixed, rigid categorization. We are ultimately shown a way through, beyond, and alongside the people, structures, and images that dominate discursive spaces.

Villano’s act of placing herself alongside other transfemmes of diverse profiles is a powerful visual commitment to solidarity across the queer community and a statement in favor of longevity. Against a framework of disaster and violence against trans women, “Muñeca” brings together the

9 Sara Ahmed, “Introduction: Find Your Way,” in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 8.

10 J. Jack Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies,” in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 13.

Wenmimareba Klobah Collins

women of the past with the ones in the present—the ghosts alongside the living. Through the very medium and distribution of a music video or song, the women on screen inhabit a life and sociality beyond their own potential lifespan.

“Muñeca” uses a distinctly queer, hyperfemme, coy humor as a strategy to hold all. We are held in all our manifold selves and emotional states. All our desires and imaginative capacities. All our intra-community laughter, dance, and revelry; the pleasures and pains conjoined. When Villano looks at us through the screen, her smirk invites us in: Leave behind all structures that presume to know, control, and subdue us. Become part of our party.

Student Bios & Acknowledgements

Liz Godbey (they/them) was born and raised in the Bay Area. They are inspired by the surrounding ecosystem and create ceramic sculptures and mixed-media works based on the organic forms and textures found there. Their written work and research include theories of enchantment, ecology, queer theory, and the intersections of settler colonialism and Western science, with consideration of their own ancestry as a person of Western European and Ojibwe descent. Godbey holds a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College and is a candidate for a dual MA/MFA degree in Fine Art and Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

Thesis Committee: Angela Hennessy, Jacqueline Francis, and Elizabeth Travelslight.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to my fellow VCS cohort members, Alex Hwang and Wenmi Klobah Collins, for their support and inspiration over the years. My deepest gratitude to the members of my thesis committee Jacqueline Francis, Việt Lê, and Angela Hennessy and to my professors Helen Klonaris, Cindy Bello, Mia Liu, Tom Haakenson, Elizabeth Travelslight, and Jeanette Roan. To Deborah Valoma. To my MFA advisors and professors. And finally, to my partner Sam, my mother Megan, and to all of my loving family and friends.

Alexander Antai Hwang is a writer, drawer, and skater from the San Francisco Bay Area. After receiving a BA in Economics with a minor in Art History and Visual Culture Studies from Whitman College, he now attends California College of the Arts where he is completing an MA in Visual & Critical Studies. As a 1.5 generation Korean-Chinese-American, Hwang draws inspiration from the rich and ongoing history of Asian American art and culture in order to break cycles of trauma and generate new ways for Asian Americans to grow and thrive.

Thesis Committee: Nilgün Bayraktar, Jacqueline Francis, and Elizabeth Travelslight.

Acknowledgements: I would like to first thank my wonderful classmates, Liz Godbey and Wenmi Klobah-Collins for all their support and insight over the past two years. Thank you to my professors for guiding my thinking: Việt Lê, Jackie Francis, Elizabeth Travelslight, Michael Wahington, Mia Liu, Jeanette Roan, and Thomas Haakenson. A special thanks to my Thesis Advisor Nilgün Bayraktar. Your encouragement was vital in completing this project. Lastly, I would like to express my gratitude to all my friends who have listened to my story.

Wenmimareba Klobah Collins is an artist, performer, writer, and cultural critic from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her creative and academic work explore the Caribbean—specifically Puerto Rico—as a geo-social and spiritual space. She’s interested in the studies of regional linguistics, speculative reimagination, textiles, and urban music. Klobah Collins seeks to engage multiple forms of resistance-making that serve as a model for creating paths into the future. She holds a BFA and a BA in Literature from the University of Puerto Rico (2020). Klobah Collins is also currently a dual-degree MFA/MA candidate in Creative Writing (poetry) and Visual & Critical Studies (VCS) at the California College of the Arts. She works as a museum educator and is passionate about cultivating curiosity, hands-on learning, and ecological stewardship.

Thesis Committee: Marcel Pardo Ariza, Jacqueline Francis, and Elizabeth Travelslight.

Acknowledgements: Jacqueline Francis, Marcel Pardo Ariza, Việt Lê, my mother, Güiro Prieto Avilés, the VCS and MFA cohorts, Samara Erin Williams, Elizabeth Travelslight, Thomas Haakenson, Mia Liu, Jeanette Roan, Cindy Bello, Lynette Cintrón Ortiz, mis cuires rebeldes, and every urban musician that has dared to remix a beat.

Visual & Critical Studies Graduate Program Chair

Jacqueline Francis, PhD, is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (University of Washington Press, 2012) and coeditor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (National Gallery of Art, 2011). Francis serves on the boards of Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture and the National Committee for the History of Art. Francis is also a curator—recent exhibitions include Fight and Flight: Crafting a Life in San Francisco (Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, 2023) and You Will Be Remembered: New Work by Adia Millett (Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong, 2022). A member of the 3.9 Art Collective of San Francisco, she is a writer who was awarded an Individual Artist Commission grant by the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2017. Both Francis and the 3.9 Art Collective were named to the 2023 YBCA 100 list, in recognition of their work in the San Francisco Bay Area cultural community.

Visual & Critical Studies 2023

Master’s Project Thesis Directors

Việt Lê is an academic, artist, writer, and curator whose work centers on spiritualities, trauma, representation, and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Duke University Press, 2021). The art book White Gaze is a collaboration with Latipa (Sming Sming Books, 2019). Lê has presented his work at the Banff Centre, the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre, the Shanghai Biennale, the Rio Gay Film Festival, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among other venues. Lê curated the exhibitions Charlie Don’t Surf! (Centre A, Vancouver, 2005); transPOP: Korea

Vi ệt Nam Remix with Yong Soon Min (ARKO, Seoul; Galerie Quynh, Sài Gòn; UC Irvine Gallery; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2008–09); and the 2012 Kuandu Biennale (Taipei). He is also a board member of Art Matters and the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco.

Elizabeth Travelslight is an artist of mixed-race heritage (Filipinx/white) with a research background in feminist-postcolonial histories and futures of math, science, and technology. Her creative practice is an ongoing braid of teaching, community organizing, and studio research through text and textiles. Travelslight earned her BA in Mathematics and MFA in Digital Art–New Media from UC Santa Cruz, and her MA in Media Studies from the European Graduate School. She currently works as an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts and serves as Political Coordinator for the CCA Union, a chapter of SEIU Local 1021.

Visual & Critical Studies 2023 Thesis Faculty Advisors

Nilgün Bayraktar is Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Program and Film Program at California College of the Arts. Her work, focusing on migrant and diasporic cinema, contemporary art, and critical border studies, has been published in journals including the Journal of European Studies, Screen City Biennial Journal, and New Cinemas. She is coeditor with Alberto Godioli of Stranger Things: Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2023) and author of Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe (Routledge, 2018), which examines cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe since the 1990s. Her current book project, Border Futurities: Countermemory and Speculative Imagination in the Cinema of Displacement, expands the chronological, geographic, and theoretical scope of her earlier research, looking beyond Europe to the Middle East, Africa, and the US–Latin American context to investigate the multiplication and diffusion of militarized borderlands. She received a BA from Sabanci University, Istanbul, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts, where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death and contemporary art. Through writing, studio work, and performance, her practice questions assumptions about Death and the Dead themselves. Ephemeral and celestial are forms constructed with everyday gestures of domestic labor—washing, wrapping, stitching, weaving, brushing, and braiding. Hennessy’s work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, Wovenutopia, and the New Yorker, and in exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Oakland Museum of California, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, and Pt. 2 Gallery. She has received awards from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Artadia, the Svane Family Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Marcel Pardo Ariza (b. Bogotá, Colombia) (they/them) is a trans visual artist, educator, and curator who explores the relationship between queer and trans kinship through constructed photographs, site-specific installations, and public programming. Their work is rooted in close dialogue and collaboration with trans, nonbinary, and queer friends and peers, most of whom are performers, artists, educators, policymakers, and community organizers. Their practice celebrates collective care and intergenerational connection while building sustainable trans futures and archiving trans history. Their work has been exhibited at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Palo Alto Art Center, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Palm Springs Art Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.

Acknowledgments

Việt Lê and Elizabeth Travelslight were the Master’s Thesis Project Directors for the 2022–23 academic year. Lê supervised the students’ thesis writing in the fall 2022 semester. Travelslight prepared students for the 2023 Spring Symposium and assumed responsibility for the production of their Sightlines essays and thesis exhibition posters.

Our colleagues housed in CCA’s dynamic academic programs provided invaluable guidance and critique to our students as Faculty Advisors: Nilgün Bayraktar (Film and History of Art and Visual Culture), Angela Hennessy (Fine Arts, Textiles, and Critical Studies) and Marcel Pardo Ariza (Photography).

Cole Ryder, a candidate in CCA’s Graduate Design Program, collaborated with the students to design their thesis exhibition posters.

MacFadden & Thorpe designed this year’s symposium program as well as the poster and banner that advertise this event. It was a pleasure to work with Brett MacFadden, who teaches in CCA’s MFA in Design Program, and Kameron Allen, who earned a BFA in Graphic Design at CCA in 2016. We also thank MacFadden & Thorpe Project Manager Maggie Wallace, who kept us all on track; and Keston Sieg Hinds Cruz (CCA BFA ’21), who typeset this book.

Victoria Gannon was our copy editor and proofreader.

Nicholas Whittington, VCS Program Manager, handled the business side of VCS.

We are grateful for all of our Humanities & Sciences (H&S) colleagues, and we offer special appreciation to Dean TT Takemoto and Director of Academic Administration Mike Rothfeld for their unwavering support.

On behalf of H&S, we express our appreciation for the leadership of CCA’s Provost Tammy Rae Carland and President Stephen Beal.