Projects

I Need To Pee!

Lloyd Center Mall, Portland, OR. 06-2024

Conducted as part of Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice Program annual Assembly, I installed an all user restroom in the family bathroom at Portland’s Lloyd Center Mall for one day on June 8th, 2024. I remade the mall signage to better instruct users on how to access the “family restroom,” the only non-gendered restroom in the mall, which also required a security guard to open. Accompanying the signage change, which was quickly removed by mall security, were paper towels that asked the questions “where is the center of your body?”, “what do you need right now?”, and “what does safety feel like in your body?”, and a zine detailing the project. I also arranged basic needs supplies in the bathroom, such as pads and tampons, narcan, water, and candies to make the bathroom more inviting and accessible for the many different kinds of people who might use it. After some back and forth with security, I was asked to removed the supplies, begging the question: what threat does an accessible restroom pose?

Alice’s Anger and Alice’s Dream

KsMOCA, Portland, OR. 11-2024

As part of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School Museum of Contemporary Art (KsMOCA), I have an ongoing mentorship with a fifth grader named Alice. The culmination of our fall term together was the multi-stage project “Alice’s Anger and Alice’s Dream.” To process our feelings about the 2024 election, we began by drawing caricatures of Donald Trump. On the back side of the page, we drew the world that we would rather see—Alice drew Kamala on top of a hill with a rainbow behind her to symbolize LGBTQ rights, while I drew an eco-commune. We formed these sheets of paper into airplanes with Trump’s image on the inside and shook off the stuck energy of helplessness and despondency by throwing them through the hallways of the school. The physical action of throwing paired with our world improving visions flying through the air reminded us there were still things we could do to bring our visions into reality.

Chairs on the Brain.

Portland, OR. 01-2025

Paper mache covered sculpture using five years of personal journals placed onto found chairs. When I first started sifting through my journals between 2016-2023 for the creation of this piece, I was operating under the assumption that I could easily separate passages that discussed me and my own self-understanding from passages that discussed others or the world at large. I hoped that doing this would reveal to me a sense of self separate from “all that other stuff”. All of the “I’s” would be in the first pile, right? The more I read, the more intertwined I saw the writings become. Sara Ahmed argues in The Cultural Politics of Emotion that “emotions should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices.” Making this piece reminded me of the powerful work emotions with and without us do in shaping our senses of self and our understandings of the world.

Songs for Dark Times Like These. With Simeen Anjum.

Portland, OR. 2024 - ongoing

In collaboration with Simeen Anjum, Songs for Dark Times Like These is an ongoing song circle in unexpected places. Building off of Simeen’s project that began in the fall of 2023, we hosted two singing circles in the fall of 2024. These informal yet structured spaces believe in the power of song to connect us to each other and to those who have sung before us to better face incoming facism and climate collapse. By singing songs of resistance found in Simeen’s home of Delhi as well as in protest cultures of the United States and around the world, we respond to Bertolt Brecht’s question: “In the dark times, will there also be singing?” with an enthusiastic yes.

Sky Play with Taking Our Time Collective

Portland, OR. 06-2024

Brought together by a shared love of the sky and desire to appreciate the everday mundane, Sky Play was an interactive performance by the sun, positioning park goers as the audience. Hosted by Taking Our Time Collective (me, Simeen Anjum, Clara Harlow, and Nina Vichayapai), attendees were invited to watch the sunset on comfortable beach chairs and blankets and provided traditional theater snacks like candy and popcorn as well as sun tea.

Sazeracs Against Surveillance

New Orleans, LA. 10-2018

Sazeracs Against Surveillance was a 2018 party/data collection tour/info session hosted by me and other members of Jewish Voice for Peace New Orleans in partnership with local coalition Eye on Surveillance, focused on better understanding surveillance in New Orleans and Palestine. Attendees perused posters about surveillance around the world while sipping their sazeracs, which were donated from an allied bar. Participants were then led on a scavenger hunt, which allowed people to talk in small groups about their motivations for coming, learn more about the surveillance network in New Orleans, and assist in a camera mapping project hosted by the local group Stop Watching NOLA.

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