A reoccurring theme in my studio is the Corporeal as Conceptual—my belief that the visceral can be taken apart and examined for its underlying social structures. In the case of “Tender Picking,” the audience was invited to eat a blue crab while listening to a recording on headphones. Each guest picked up one half of a charged conversation between two lovers who are incapable of intimate connection without one destroying the other. Guests didn’t know they were listening to an incomplete story, but it became obvious over time which position they inadvertently stepped into: The Desiring (consumer) or The Object of Desire (crab).

As guests milled around the gallery they drank champagne, listened to a deconstructed Spice Girls track (Two Become One), and watched the grotesque distortion of hands carefully picking at animal corpses in the mirror. The spectacle of eating was made conscious and self-aware by its projection into the space. Sitting on a low cushion, surrounded by candles, flowers and champagne, made a typically raucous and careless meal (The Crab Feast) intimate and even sensual. I was told by guests who stumbled unknowingly into the gallery that their experience was “curiously romantic.”

The most careful listeners in the crowd came away with a deep sense of sadness, having picked up on racial tension between the lovers:

“I’m pure, white, fleckless!/ But you?/ If I opened you up it’d be so red, so deeply crimson, it’d look black!// (laughs) //So black your insides would disappear!”

“I know I’m full of blood and guts/ Of deep crimson and black/ Of galaxies/ Of endless space/ Terrifyingly endless/ Universes inside of me// The responsibility is enormous”

Some guests, unable to engage at all, left with an overwhelming sense of disgust at the spectacle. To them I say: We live in a system that perpetuates violence on certain bodies every single day. So, swallow that disgust, make it part of who you are, then shit it out so we can all see it for what it is.

Hope can be found in destruction. Inside “Tender Picking,” true transformation comes in the form of metabolization. By definition, metabolization is the integration of energy sources, a regeneration of the original. At the core of “Tender Picking” is a generous act of trust, of opening oneself up to the state of the other, of incorporating the other into the self; an act of true and compassionate vulnerability.