(A Timeline of Things) ; An archive of feeling (and being felt)
A History of Everything
2026
Installation; drawings, screenprints, and risographs, cut-out photographs, a mop, a mop bucket, a level, two hammers, two scissors, three red solo cups, extension cords, paper bags, tissue papers, towels, blankets, shirts, and wood.
20'×8'×7'
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Video Performance
I play my red toy harmonica; the wind joins and ever thing follows.
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Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh, PA
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​Wax crayons and colored pencils on paper. ​
A Body Without Organs
November 7, 2025 - January 10, 2026
Cage Match Project: Round 25,The Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, TX.
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Installation; paper-mache, fabric, ropes, thread, pool noodles, wire, plastic, wood, porcelain, PVC tubes, pulleys, sound tubes, and bells ​​​​​
20'×8'×7'
Knotted bedsheets become flesh, knotted ropes turn into guts. An industrial caged-trailer became a cartoon body. Plastic, and wooden bones wove in and out of a rigid metal grid. Periodically activated, exposed to the elements, and under 24-hour public viewership, the body is always changing and the self with it. ​​
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Performance; in collaboration with Leo Briggs, featuring Venese Alcantar, Angel Blanco, and Katherine Vaughn.
00:45:00
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Part 1: November 7th, 2025, at 7:30pm
Part 2: November 15th, 2025, at 6:00pm​
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Performers and audiences moved in, out, and around a living labyrinthine vessel to investigate boundaries between self and other. The body's porous and messy limits are site and instrument for exploring difference, between subject and object, agency and passivity, and innocence and control. Vulnerability becomes spectacle. Intrusion occurs. The self changes and so does the other.​
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Video documentation by Tova Katzman. Photos by Aryel Rene Jackson​​​
​00:01:30 | Video documentation by Tova Katzman.
The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars
2025
Site-responsive installation; drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, found objects, performance documentation, and other ephemera.
12' x 12' x 28'
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The Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX. ​​
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A constellation of things formed a living monument to the world-making potential of play and performance. At the center sat an oversized paper-mache tiger and a spigot made from aluminum foil; orbiting these were a flower, a horse, stars, ropes, fabrics, cue cards, megaphones, flags, radios, ladders, a harmonica, and a copy Larry Mitchell’s 1977 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.
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Photo documentation by Alex Boschenstein​
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Holding the Sun
Cut-out monotypes, paper-mache, tape, rope, wood, wood, a plastic chain, and a yellow belt
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The Spigot | 2024
27" x 33" x 12"
Paper-mache, fabric, foam, wire, and aluminum foil
Photo documentation by Tova Katzman
The Spigot is a pathtic form.
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Dubious Bodies of Water
2025
42 x 40 inches
Gouache on paper; wood, thread, clothespins, and broom head
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The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars
Performance; with Leo Briggs, featuring Venese Alcantar, Angel Blanco, Sofie Cardinal, Emily Heath, Aída Hernandez-Reyes, Sam Mandelbaum, Micah Senter, Katherine Vaughn, and Joshua Winn.​ ​​​​
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The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars is a collaborative practice of play. Sometimes, it happens in public and an audience witnesses.​​​​​​​ We build and enact a world shaped by desire and the collective—by our erotic and political imaginations.
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The Cohen New Works Festival 2025, Austin, TX.​​​​​
Video documentation by Tova Katzman. Photos by Phoebe Shuman-Goodier.
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Fearlessness is fearlessness
2024
Pastels on paper​
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The Distance the Wind Travels
2024
00:09:59
Video Performance​.
Documentation by Tova Katzman​
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A Spirit in Flight
2024
Fresco, earth pigments and plaster on drywall​
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No I, no here, no now
May 2024
Monotype installation​
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Dust to Dust
2024
Porcelain clay​
and monotypes​
A second skin
Monotype
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You Are Here
May 2023
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A pop-up solo-show gathering work created over five years living and working in Williamstown, MA. Cartoon forms blur reality and imagination, reflected on identity, distance, and the search for belonging are things that are built. How does being and feeling out of place open new ways of understanding ourselves, and the worlds we inhabit?
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collection of weapons found in the empty lot next to my house
2022
sticks, metal, twine, colored pencils on rocks, paper, and a fly
Nowhere
2021
​​82” x 92”
hand-sewn quilt​​
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Javier Robelo is an artist from Managua, Nicaragua. He engages play as a world-making practice. He lives and works in Austin, TX.
He received an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in Art History and Studio Art from Williams College. He was an artist-in-residence at Bunker Projects (Pittsburgh, PA) and Cage Match Project (Austin, TX.) His work has been exhibited at 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). He teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Photo by Phoebe Shuman-Goodier