A 21st century bildungsroman of depersonalization, this project begins, approximately, at the flea market that takes place in the Oakland Coliseum and continues through visits to the Roman Colosseum, Venice Biennale, Documenta Athens, and happenings in Paris, Berlin, New York, Marfa and Los Angeles. Much of the project takes place in settings occasioned for art purposes. The project exists in a period of precarity and privilege; tenuous freelance work, unstable housing, displacement, credit cards and cheap air travel. There are themes of parenting, romance and complex relationships with the implicated technologies. The boundaries between this project, art and identity are blurry, and seek to integrate an evolving version of self into a larger ecological coexistence.
The project was documented over a year on instagram and exists as an archive of images and writing. A PDF version is available here (approx. 500mb, 700 pages).
A few excerpts are shown below. The archive remains in its original sequence @perryshimon on instagram
An installation version was realized at Cuesta College in 2018 and included images of Chumash petroglyphs from the Carrizo Plain.
A working version of an edited down book version is available here at web resolution
....the image itself, impoverished of resolution, impressed with its limitations, its failures, creates an artifact of our fleeting correspondence…
Does this project need a trailer? [music note emoji] Firenze piazza bucket drummer, colosseo tour guide and berghain dj
...a woman sweeping in a dollar store, pausing to examine a synthetic flower under the coursing nighttime fluorescents…
...a recurring character i've been calling Capital...
Spring is not a time for austerity
Something has changed in me and I think it has to do with the wild, braided, Armenian mountain sorrel. Remember El Paso, not far from where satellite maps told us Helen of Troy intersects with Corona del Sol?
The etymology of Helen’s name continues to be a problem for scholars. Some connected this to a hypothetical proto indo-european sun goddess, noting her name’s connection to the word for “sun” in various indo-european cultures.
We found respite in a taqueria, behind a mercado, in the segundo barrio. That second Ellis island on the Rio Grand. The room was cold and plastic and the owner gave us the streaming internet remote control.
We took turns in the bathroom and put on a nature documentary about bears. The petrochemicals, dirty fry oil and comfort we felt in each other. Sitting close on the same side of the table. The bears buffering in the snow, and then again in the spring bloom.
One day we might talk about that time, on Chevy Chase boulevard, in little Armenia, where I wore your furry coat, looked a little llama-like, and Sherpa’d your instruments to the rent-a-car.
Quipu stories, a young Nigerian artist, a dark indoor amphitheater with real time LED stock market prices and haunting Greek choruses, military grade sound canons shooting stories from below, instruments made with objects from a refugee camp, photos of how the oppressed internalize their oppression in occupied Palestine, a displaced tent cast in marble looking at the Acropolis, a Thai revolutionary libretto, a prolific sleep talker, a revived synthesizer, a failed musical language, shimmering voodoo paintings, 3D printed gender ambiguous forms, colorful Pakistani weddings tents in a square filled with birds where they serve free lunch every day, a symposium on capital, a tribute to Graciela Paraskevaídis, an archive of Biafra, a school of gesture, a dancer stripping off layers and their meanings, woven constellations, ineffable books, simple sketches, murdered children, banned western decadent art, poultry farm work camps, vacuum sealed refugee sculptures, glitching Nina Simone wind, hermaphrodite hormone therapy, daytime talk shows, Gauguin's gaze in today's Tahiti, all the things she knows but can't stop thinking about, a drawing table sculpture for a Jane Bowles passage with a sepulchral and mid century modern inflection, dried ngalama leaves being prepared for the dye pot, a razed forest, dancing bodies, a room full of masks, a home screen screenshot, a recurrent set of ground rules performed in different institutional settings, an archive on sugar plantations, the many headed hydra, untitled dark sky mezzotints
I’ve mistaken the sun for a fruit, shape shifting, mountain lifting, the patala incident, the Jain version and other texts
