With its countless structural possibilities, the accordion book lends itself to visual storytelling and language transmission through both space and time: In One Room Schoolhouse, self-portraiture interacts via internal dialogues between past and present. In leaving the profession of teaching this year, I began to question various selves as they operate in and out of time: self as educator, Queer self, simulacrum of self, self as schoolboy, self within one moment, self against the next, selfie. The question then arose about where these selves operate within the schoolhouse: a late capitalist, historically oppressive, racist, colonized and heteronormative system. In a spirit of loose self-portraiture, using pen-and-ink sketching, walnut oil paintings, watercolor, printmaking, and collage, I integrate process into this space as an argument with formal education and with labor. ​

Here, the present tense is made visible by these sketches–ephemera that drew my eye toward subjects, culminating in pen and ink, watercolor, walnut oil, and charcoal drawings and brushwork, all entering smaller accordion books as a record of a (present) self of 2023. In this way, to be–to be fully present–resists against an institution that continually expects capitalist forms of production while also perpetuating violences against Queer bodies. The use of the accordion book, ephemera, and deconstruction further offer loose narratives in which present selves dig into past selves; paper, here, operates as a source of reclamation. In the profession of teaching, labor is often coded in paper-pushing: worksheets, workbooks, copy-making, and assessment. ​

Here, too, paper operates as a mode of healing through personal story-telling and building. It questions linear narrative: each fold of the book allows a different story; each image interacts in countless possibilities of sequencing and juxtaposition, constructing, reconstructing, and deconstructing stories. Past, too, reconciles with present in different modes of self-portraiture.

A blue ink monoprint, for example, lays bare a reproduction of a photograph of myself at 11, while a recent watercolor portrait, now ripped and reassembled, converses with this child over 1980s portraiture of Peter Staley, an ACT UP activist, and Al Corley, who played Steven on Dynasty.  Poems, too, mimic the sonics and the sounds meant to accompany the installation as a near audiobook, adding argument to traditional modes of storytelling, while further audio components to this installation incorporate walking, distortion of sound, paper fanning, a rainstorm, and a drain, meant to accompany the book’s various arcs: conflict and disturbance juxtaposed with drainage and paper, which can now operate as a form of drying, cooling, and healing. ​

dig.mp3
File Size:	5545 kb
File Type:	mp3

Download File

---