A Body Without Organs (Installation)
2025
Site-responsive performance installation; paper mache, fabric, ropes, thread, pool noodles, wire, plastic, wood, porcelain, PVC tubes, pulleys, sound tubes, bells
20'×8'×7'
Presented for Cage Match Project: Round 25 at the Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, TX.
An industrial caged-trailer reimagined as a living organism, animated through playful interactions between people, objects, and landscape. Acts of touching, ripping, tying, making, and unmaking turn bedsheets into flesh, ropes into guts, and plastic, paper, and wood into bones, all weaving in and out of the rigid metal grid. Periodically activated, exposed to the elements, and under 24-hour public viewership, the installation exists in a constant state of transformation.
A Body
A Body Without Organs (Performance)
45-minute public performance in collaboration with Leo Briggs, featuring Angel Blanco and Venese Alcantar.
Part 1: November 7th, 2025, at 7:30pm
Part 2: November 15th, 2025, at 6:00pm
Presented for Cage Match Project: Round 25 at the Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, TX.
Developed through thirteen hours of rehearsals, this improvisational collaborative performance investigates the boundaries between self and other. What does it mean to be inside the cage? What does it mean to step out of it? In this first of two public activations, performers and audiences move in and around the installation, animating it as a living, labyrinthine vessel. The body, with its porous and messy limits, becomes both site and instrument for communally exploring difference, between subject and object, human and nonhuman, agency and passivity, and innocence and control.
Part 1
The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars (Installation)
2025
Site-responsive performance installation; drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, found objects, performance documentation, and other ephemera.
12' x 12' x 28'
A constellation of interactive sculptures made from paper-mache, cardboard, fabric, and found objects. At the center sits an oversized tiger head and a spigot made from aluminum foil; orbiting these are a flower, a horse, stars, and props like ropes, fabrics, cue cards, megaphones, flags, radios, ladders, a harmonica, and a copy Larry Mitchell’s 1977 manifesto The Faggots and their Friends between Revolutions. Two monitors display camcorder recordings made by audience members during public outdoor activations. Porcelain bones, shaped, carefully placed, and stumbled over during a solo durational performance, remain on stage. The installation stood as a living monument to the world-making potential of play and performance.
Presented for the MFA Thesis Show Acceleration without Arrival at the Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX. (April 18 – May 10, 2025)
Photo documentation by Alex Boschenstein
A flower
Camcorder footage
a harmonica
a megaphone,
and Larry Mitchell's The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions
The Tiger
Dubious bodies of water, 2024
Gouache on paper
The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars (Performance)
2025
On Sundays, and sometimes Tuesday nights, we gather a porous community of queer movers and feelers on a patch of grass, sometimes in-doors, and sometimes on-stage. The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars is a collaborative practice of touch, precarity, and care, of choice and play, of world-building and story-telling. It brings people into a communal search for beauty in the pathetic, and liberation in feeling out-of-place. Occasionally, this happens in public, and audience witnesses.
16 hours of rehearsal and three 45-minute public performances in collaboration with Leo Briggs, featuring Venese Alcantar, Angel Blanco, Sofie Cardinal, Emily Heath, Aída Hernandez-Reyes, Sam Mandelbaum, Micah Senter, Katherine Vaughn, and Joshua Winn. Presented for The Cohen New Works Festival 2025, Austin, TX.
Part 1: April 8th, 2025 at 5:00pm
Part 2: April 10th, 2025, at 12:30pm
Part 3: April 11th, 2025, at 3:00pm
16 hours of rehearsal and One 45-minute public performances in collaboration with Leo Briggs, featuring Venese Alcantar, Angel Blanco, Sofie Cardinal, Emily Heath, Aída Hernandez-Reyes, Sam Mandelbaum, Micah Senter, Katherine Vaughn, and Joshua Winn. Presented for The Cohen New Works Festival 2025, Austin, TX.
Part 4: June 28th, 2025 at 8:00pm
Presented in a backyard, Austin, TX.
The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars reimagines the material world, the hand-made, the non-human, and the space around us as familiar skins to become reacquainted with through considered touch. We adopt a modality of play, putting imagination at the front of every social encounter to investigate new ways of relating to ourselves, others, to objects and things, and to place. We build and enact a world ever transformed by desire and the collective—by our erotic and political imaginations.
A Rehearsal
Part 3
A Star
A Sign
A Victim of Circumstance
A Ladder
A Flower (again)
An orbiting
An Exit
No I, no here, no now, 2024
Monotypes, frescos, and porcelain bones, exploring queer embodiment and temporality through playful yet distressed cartoon figures that blur boundaries between self, others, and landscape. Drawing on cartoon logic and archaeological forms, it envisioned a collective origin myth beyond linear time and singular identity.
Bent, 2024
Over, 2024
You Are Here, 2023
A solo show gathering work created over five years living and working in Williamstown, MA. Through cartoon forms blurring reality and imagination, the work reflected on identity, distance, and the search for belonging. It examined how being and feeling out of place can open new ways of understanding ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.
collection of weapons found in the empty lot next to my house, sticks, metal, twine, colored pencils on rocks, paper, and a fly, 2022
nowhere, hand-sewn quilt, 2021
about
Javier Robelo (b.2000) is multidisciplinary artist from Managua, Nicaragua, whose practice orbits the liberatory potential of feeling out-of-place. He works across drawing, print, sculpture, and performance to excavate and celebrate queer feeling. Moving and making slantwise across disciplines, Javier dreams, builds, and enacts other worlds, ever animated by beings feeling and being felt.
Cartoon bodies pollinate, knot, and transform their surroundings; cartoon worlds respond with comically exaggerated, opposite reactions. His drawings and prints, present cartoon logic as a metaphor for queer being, where skin is not the limit of the self but a connective tissue to the other. Javier makes these ethos material in colorful, interactive sculptural constellations, that eagerly anticipate being danced with, sweated on, and pulled apart. These amalgamations of difference become animated through playful performances, inviting participants and witnesses to reimagine social orders, find pleasure in transformation, and indulge in the in-between.
Intentionally inhabiting spaces of not-knowing and the improvisational collaborations (with materials and with others) that arise, serves as praxis for constructing queer cosmologies. Javier approaches making as an embodied, spatial, and relational questioning of the paths we are supposed to follow, straying from them to remake the world otherwise.
Javier received a BA in Art History and Studio Art from Williams College and an MFA in Printmaking and Sculpture from the University of Texas at Austin. He has exhibited his work at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts (Pittsfield, MA), The Arts Center of the Capital Region (Troy, NY), The Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA), The Joseph Gross Gallery at the University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), and the Visual Arts Center (Austin, TX).
