“BOYBLUE” is a performance lecture for Zoom that was initially performed in April of 2020. In this piece, I start by saying “I feel, I feel like I am disappearing. Do you ever wonder what it would be like to be blue. Not just the feeling, but also not not the feeling too. But, what would it mean to be blue? To be the color on the horizon.” At this point, I began to apply a blue pigment to my face and set the green screen feature to essentially “erase” my face, revealing underneath a Yves Klein monochrome painting. As I continue to speak and paint my face, more and more of my portrait becomes a rupture.

This piece came to be out of a writing project that I started in the absence of a studio and traditional workspace. I had my laptop and one of my few comforts in isolation was literature and language. Writing opened up a landscape that was otherwise inaccessible to me. At this time, a lot of people–including myself– were learning to communicate through the platform Zoom. I started to experiment with its capabilities and shortcomings as an art making medium. The language and the visual component of this work relate to the flattened space that Zoom creates and I wanted to interrogate that in this work.

The color blue has always had a spiritual dimension for me, but there is also a conceptual framework that it operates within as well. I was deeply inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and how they both dealt with these layers in dynamic ways. I end the work repeating the phrase, “Where do you go when you disappears, and what gets left behind?” Since the beginning of the pandemic I have grappled with a subconscious sense of loss that permeates everyday life now, and I wonder what I do to deal with that. So at the same time that I worry about the loss of life to the hands of the pandemic –and systemic violence that occurs in tandem– I wonder where do I go when I leave myself? When I am no longer in my body, when I escape reality in order to manage my grief. I am not entirely sure, but I answer it with the color blue.