I chose to hold a funeral (performance) for a year-long daily wearable Neoprene duration project, on my 35th birthday: a dual funeral and birth celebration. We live above an artist-run gallery we co-run, and the performance took place in a long, narrow stairwell between the spaces. A monitor at the top of the steps played an animation collage that a friend and frequent collaborator Vesper James had made of my duration project for a previous exhibition. The stairs were draped with the daily colorful Neoprene pieces. Video art depicting the photo/video evidence of the daily wearable sketches by my comic and video artist husband, Clint Basinger, was projected up the stairs. The soundtrack was a looped sound collage Clint and I made the morning of my birthday. One of my 2020 goals was to merge work and ideas with my husband more, and this piece was an early sketch of that goal. During the performance Clint and I activated the Neoprene pieces while reacting to each other. Then we crumbled up vintage Ringling Brothers coloring book pages and shot them up the steps with a high-powered fan. The white paper would glow when it hit the vibrant projection. The pages represented my next duration project. Shooting these paper wishes into the projection merged these past and future projects together. We transitioned to the bottom of the steps and into new outfits that represented our future selves. Clint became his alter ego—Future Clint. I became a ringmaster. My family and friends were in the dark at the bottom of the steps; my 89-year-old grandmother in the front! At the end of the performance frequent collaborator and avid cyclist, Annie Brown, rode her bike into the stairwell and took the Neoprene away, leaving us with only our future selves. Annie admitted: “I’ve ridden my bike over obstacles of every kind, jumped off boulders and riverbanks, but it wasn’t as difficult as riding in a hallway crowded with people.”

After the performance my friends and family enjoyed a rainbow potluck in the gallery space. Everyone was invited to color the crunched-up Ringling pages, doubling as performance relics. We colored and watched my favorite Ringling Circus. We gathered those pages into one two-dimensional commemorative work. The whole experience was intimate, connective, and joyful—and right before we jumped into the masks and isolation of the rest of the year.