(A Timeline of Things)
an archive of feeling (and being felt)
Being and Being with Others
Past, Present, Future
Here and nowhere
A practice
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I made this monotype in 2024. I present it here as the thesis of my work. I am guided by ever-transforming conceptions of self and other, the attraction between differences, and the precarity of everyday erotics.
We bend, break, melt into one another. We are made of flesh, bones, dirt, and dust. We are unmade by feeling and being felt.
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A History of Everything (Installation)
December 2025 - January 10, 2026
Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh, PA
20'×8'×7'
​​Site-responsive installation; drawings, screenprints, and risographs, cut-out photograph, 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.
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Touch, Witness, Disolve
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Detail of A History of Everything (Installation)
December 2025 - January 10, 2026
Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh, PA​
Wax crayons and colored pencils on paper.
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In tenth grade, I made a flower costume for Halloween. Time folds onto itself, and the self with it.
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A History of Everything (Performance)
January 2026
00:05:00
Video Performance
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I believe the world is something we make, and so can be made differently, here and now. This is a brief attempt at summarizing all that was, is, and will be. I play my red toy harmonica, and the wind joins and plays along with me.
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A Body Without Organs (Installation)
November 7, 2025 - January 10, 2026
Cage Match Project: Round 25,The Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, TX.
20'×8'×7'
Site-responsive performance installation; paper-mache, fabric, ropes, thread, pool noodles, wire, plastic, wood, porcelain, PVC tubes, pulleys, sound tubes, and bells ​​​​​
An industrial caged-trailer reimagined as a cartoon body: a living organism animated through playful interactions with and between people, objects, and landscape. Acts of touching, ripping, tying, transform bedsheets into flesh, ropes into guts. Plastic, paper, and wooden bones weave in and out of the 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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A Body Without Organs (Performance)
​Part 1: November 7th, 2025, at 7:30pm
Part 2: November 15th, 2025, at 6:00pm​
Cage Match Project: Round 25, The Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, TX.​
Two 45-minute performances in collaboration with Leo Briggs, featuring Venese Alcantar, Angel Blanco, and Katherine Vaughn. Video documentation by Tova Katzman. Photos by Aryel Rene Jackson.
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​​​Throughout two public activations, performers and audiences moved in, out, and around the installation: a living, labyrinthine vessel to investigate boundaries between self and other. The body, with its porous and messy limits, serves as site and instrument for exploring difference, between subject and object, agency and passivity, and innocence and control. Vulnerability becomes spectacle.
Intrusion occurs. Again, the self changes and so does the other.​​​​​​
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00:01:30
Video documentation by Tova Katzman.
The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars (Installation)
​April 18 - May 10, 2025
The Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX. ​​
12' x 12' x 28'
Site-responsive installation; drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, found objects, performance documentation, and other ephemera.
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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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The Tiger is a corageous figure.
The Spigot is a pathtic form.
Photo by Tova Katzman
Holding the Sun
Collaged monotypes,
I dreamt of this assemblage as an altar to touch. Trace monotypes are made by putting a sheet of paper directly on a rolled out ink. My fingers tore many bits of painter's tape and the adhesive brings the fragments. Taught ropes form wood into structure. Touch brings us together and pulls us apart.
Dubious bodies of water
I spent the summer of 2024 in Michigan near many bodies of water. If we understand our selves as extensions of the landscape, I am certain we are more than 70 percent water. The wind is a recurring character in my work. I return to questions of agency and control.
Nowhere
2021
hand-sewn quilt
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I made this quilt in college, and have carried it with me since. It was included in the installation shown above, and has been activated in performances. We live with things. We touch them, and they touch us.
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The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars (Performance)
​Part 1: April 8th, 2025 at 5:00pm
​Part 2: April 10th, 2025, at 12:30pm
Part 3: April 11th, 2025, at 3:00pm
The Cohen New Works Festival 2025, Austin, TX.​​​
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Three 45-minute 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.​ ​​​​Video documentation by Tova Katzman. Photos by Phoebe Shuman-Goodier.
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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.​​​​​​​ The material world, the hand-made, the non-human, and place are familiar skins to become reacquainted with through considered touch. Play puts imagination at the front of every social encounter, enacting new ways of relating to ourselves, others, to objects and things, and to our surroundings. People fall and stumble. Someone reads from Larry Mitchell's The Faggots and their Friends between revolutions for guidance. We build and enact a world ever transformed by desire and the collective—by our erotic and political imaginations.​
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A star
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constructed with risographs used to advertise the performance.
The Tiger and The Spigot: How to Proceed (Performance)
Part 4: June 7th, 2025, at 6:00pm​
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A 45 minute performance in collaboration with Leo Briggs, featuring Venese Alcantar, Sofie Cardinal, Emily Heath, and Sam Mandelbaum.
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Again, but different; in a backyard, periodically interrupted by planes, and threatened by a neighbor's noise complaint.​​​​
A Rehearsal
Sunday, April 18th, 2025​​
00:05:00
Video Documentation by Tova Katzman​
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We rehearse what is and what is possible. We try something together, then do it again.
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Fearlessness is fearlessness
2024
Fresco, earth pigments and plaster on drywall​
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The Distance the Wind Travels
October 2024
00:09:59
Video Performance​. Documentation by Tova Katzman
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I go where the wind blows. How do we become one?
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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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I am interested in the distance between things: Our selves and our bodies, our bones and our skin, and the stars. Muddy browns and acidic yellows, of being inside and outside one's body.
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A second skin
Monotype
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Dust to Dust
Porcelain clay
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I am interested in where we draw the line between the human, the flesh, and the spirit.
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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
about
Javier Robelo is an artist from Managua, Nicaragua. Across drawing, print, sculpture, and performance, he excavates queer feeling—making and moving slantwise to dream, build, and enact other worlds. Through playful improvisations with materials and with others, he constructs a queer cosmology.
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His drawings and prints depict cartoon bodies pollinating, knotting, and transforming their surroundings, and cartoon worlds that respond with comically exaggerated, opposite reactions. Cartoon logic reimagines skin not as the limit of the self but as a connective tissue to the other. This ethos becomes material in colorful sculptural constellations, and is enacted in playful particpatory happenings that animate these.
He received an MFA in Print and Sculpture from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in Art History and Studio Art from Williams College. He has been an artist in residence at Bunker Projects (Pittsburgh, PA) and Cage Match Project (Austin, TX). He has exhibited his work 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).
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Photo by Tova Katzman