(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'
A history of everything / 2026 / video performance / 00:05:00 / Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh, PA
I play my red toy harmonica; the wind joins and ever thing follows.
To fold onto one's self / 2026 / wax crayons and colored pencils on paper /
A Body Without Organs / 2025 / Installation; paper-mache, fabric, ropes, thread, pool noodles, wire, plastic, wood, porcelain, PVC tubes, pulleys, sound tubes, and bells. 20'×8'×7' / Photos by Aryel Rene Jackson / Cage Match Project: Round 25,The Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, TX.
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.
A Body Without Organs / 2025 / Performance / With Leo Briggs, featuring Venese Alcantar, Angel Blanco, and Katherine Vaughn / 00:45:00
Performers and audiences moved in, out, and around a living labyrinthine vessel to investigate boundaries between self and other.
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' / The Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX. / Photo documentation by Alex Boschenstein
Holding the Sun / 2025 / Cut-out monotypes, paper-mache, tape, rope, wood, wood, a plastic chain, and a yellow belt.
The Spigot / 2024 / Paper-mache, fabric, foam, wire, and aluminum foil /27" x 33" x 12" / Photo by Tova Katzman / On the way back from Lamesa, TX
Dubious bodies of water / 2025 / Gouache on paper; wood, thread, clothespins, and broom head / 42in x 40in
The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars / 2025 / Performance / 00:45:00 / With Leo Briggs, featuring Venese Alcantar, Angel Blanco, Sofie Cardinal, Emily Heath, Aída Hernandez-Reyes, Sam Mandelbaum, Micah Senter, Katherine Vaughn, and Joshua Winn / Photo by Phoebe Shuman-Goodier / The Cohen New Works Festival 2025, Austin, TX.
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.
00:05:00, Video documentation by Tova Katzman
Fearlessness is fearlessness / 2024 / Pastel on paper
The distance the wind travels, 2024, video performance, 00:09:59, Video documentation by Tova Katzaman.
A spirit in flight, 2024, fresco, earth pigments and plaster on drywall
No I, no here, no now, 2024, monotype installation
Dust to dust, 2024, Porcelain clay and monotypes
A second skin, 2024, Monotype
Bare bones, 2024, porcelain clay
You Are Here, 2023, a pop-up solo-show, Williamstown, MA
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, hand-sewn quilt, 82” x 92”
(about)
Javier Robelo is an artist from Managua, Nicaragua, whose work engages play as a world-making practice. Drawing from Latin American and queer histories of image-making, craft, and performance, he renders a colorful cartoon cosmology. With interactive sculptures, he activates space and emotions; the beings in world he creates feel and are felt.
Javier has an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in Art History and Studio from Williams College. He was an artist-in-residence at Bunker Projects (Pittsburgh, PA) and Cage Match Project at The Museum of Human Achievement (Austin, TX) and 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). He teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.
Photo by Phoebe Shuman-Goodier