moonbeam project
2017-2018
By chanceI found a cache of early eighties design and culture magazines, including Domus, Wet Magazine, and Archetype, which had been published at the dawn of the AIDS crisis, Reagan/Thatcher, environmental crisis, and perestroika. Flipping through their yellowed pages, it’s not hard to find evidence of utopian schemes, aspirational designs, vampiric ecstasies: a blend of irony and innocence. I realized I could disintegrate content in these magazines by tearing and reassembling them in large compositions, as if I were an artist from their future…an alternative, fictional future that couldhave opened multiple lines, perhaps many survival supply chains, as the collective authors of thosezines seem to have desired. Moonbeam Series conjugates this anti-normotic cosmos. ‘Moonbeam’ recalls Moonbeam McSwine, a character from the fifties comic strip, L’il Abner. She took part in action of the strip as a sideways observer, always under surveillance by the other citizens of the strip. She’s outside the norm, suspected ‘whore’, a bit player, who prefers pigs to men, and claims to be the only literate denizen of Dogpatch USA. L’il Abner glorified misogyny and xenophobia, typical of the paranoid bubble of twentieth mid-century, and so alive and well at present. In the Moonbeam Project two eras in play, fifties/sixties and eighties/nineties, evidence in scraps and bits exploding outof the desert like a bomb. Moonbeam lights the fuse just by hanging out.
Staying with the trouble – to draw on Donna Haraway – Moonbeam’s iterations are co-constituted with animal sentience: one painting maps pathways for the cougar P-22, now living in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. Sometimes lines mesh into phrases, copied by hand from writers working from an apocalyptic, queer, and/or science fiction perspective like Leslie Marmon Silko, Lidia Yuknavitch, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia E. Butler. Moonbeam, who’d have been a sexy forty-year- old then had she still been drawn, gives access…Fighting with the culture of systemic violence releases a lot of debris, in splintered registers. The compositions interface that weird stasis-multiplicity of how we experience image fragments online. Replete in granular details, Moonbeam’s schemes point to a crisis or opportunity in design in the midst of communal collapse and transformation. Beginning this project, in the fall of 2016, I pivoted on the Pussy-Grabs-Back meme, and since then by #MeToo and #Black Lives Matter. Questions of identity: these force the issue of what is it to be called out, bullied, made to feel shame?
‘Moonbeam’ is a gift from my mother, who, back in my high school days, used to call me Moonbeam McSwine—ambivalent praise for teen independence and a slam on my adolescent body. Now working 'as' Moonbeam I find content that emulates screen distraction, or 'discognition'. I think this is the disassociative effect related to being bombarded with taunts. The paintings are an affront, and comic from a place of shadows and detailed depth. They make perestroika -- restructuring, reforming.
As sociologist Avery F. Gordon writes, "We tend to think of the archive as a repository of memories, things, and documents from the past, or, as a technique that turns or arrests the present into a past. What kind of archive safeguards or keeps company with or 'summons,' to use Chimurenga Library’s words, a past that the present hasn’t yet caught up with? Can such a past or such an archive be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative? "
Paintings in the Moonbeam Project have shown at Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (2019), Osos Contemporary (2022), but have not been installed as a full exhibition thus far (2024).