Over the Fall, Winter and Spring of 2020 and 2021, I worked with students at the Elevation Children’s Center to create artwork for an empty street sign at Field and Frame, a film and video production company located at 107 Tulane Dr. SE, Albuquerque, NM.

This collaboration, called the Elevation Project, is an initiative of Friends of the Orphan Signs (FOS), a collaborative public art and educational organization that revitalizes abandoned road signs in New Mexico and along historic Route 66. FOS facilitates collaborations with local communities with the aim of designing new imagery and text to install in empty signs as public art pieces that explore neighborhood identity.

Elevation Children’s Center offers “immersive outdoor programs that benefit from the ecological diversity and beauty of our region.” Between September 2020, and May 2021, I met the children at various base camps around the city to artistically collaborate and explore the natural world, and documented the process. I brought art supplies that were easy to transport to the sites on foot and worked with the children to make creative responses in the environment. I used documentation of their creative and exploratory acts to create final artworks that were installed on the Field and Frame sign on five separate occasions, from December to May.

The purpose of the Elevation Project is to give local children some ownership over how their neighborhood looks, and to show them at earliest stages in their education they can have a positive, visible, and lasting impact on the community. This idea aligns with the mission of Elevation Children’s Center: to emphasize the importance of children in our society by making their presence more visible in public space. By sharing the unique artistic perspectives of local children on a sign that would otherwise be empty, we build on the school’s philosophy that children should have an active presence in the Albuquerque community.

This project is supported in part by New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by the City of Albuquerque Urban enhancement Trust Fund.

and so, forever was a solo exhibition at Vitrine Gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 1-22, 2019.

How good—to be alive! 
How infinite—to be 
Alive—two-fold—The Birth I had 
And this—besides, in—Thee!
—Emily Dickinson, excerpt from #470 

and so, forever explores the initiatory process of pregnancy and birth, and was made to welcome my son into the world.

In 1617 Robert Fludd created an etching of a black square accompanied by the words “Et sic in infinitum,” translated from Latin as “and so, forever.” For Fludd, this celestial, macrocosmic image is the “metaphysical iconography of the infinite...a representation of the prima materia, the beginning of all creation.” 

The context for the ritual space and so, forever borrows from Fludd’s idea of an immense dark beginning, but looks to the immanence of the cave, the well and the womb as iconography of the infinite. Installation, sculpture and drawings reference the symbolic mark-making of the ancients, reflect on the universal biological process of creation, and celebrate the transcendence of the spirit as it finds a home in a new body. These ideas are manifest in embodied metaphors of the hand, eye, umbilical cord, placenta and caul. This space is held to honor the two-fold initiation of the birthing and the birthed.

[Schor, G. R. (2006, May 1). Black moods. Retrieved from https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/black-moods]

The Raw Miraculous was a solo exhibition held at the Hardwood Art Center in Albuquerque, NM, from April 6-27, 2018. This work functioned as a ritual space with the work from the series Portals seen in succession like the stations of the cross, leading to an Altar to the Elements.

The Raw Miraculous draws from age-old traditions of looking to nature, and is inspired by those who dream to envision the heavens. Born out of an awe-stricken reveling at the unknowable qualities in the creation of life, it is a testament to the raw miraculous at work.

This installation reflects and directly references the symbology of Renaissance mystics and alchemists, 20th century Transcendentalists, and the ancient Cycladic occult; to wonder upon the the Microcosm of human life, the Macrocosm of the universe, and how these two worlds might intersect within the body. My exploration takes the form of ceramic totems and mandalas of fire, water, earth and air; suns, moons, stars and clouds; and are alight with metallics of gold, silver, copper and bronze. Placed against backdrops of patterned paintings, handmade papers and textiles, these sculptures take on the quality of altarpieces. Small precursor drawings, prints and papers accompany this work.

In love and in pain, collaboratively and alone, from birth until death, we all engage in procreative rituals of mythic proportions. The Raw Miraculous is an imaginative, ecstatic devotion to the beauty of creating life. This is the enactment of a creation myth. 

Photos by Aziza Murray

Happy Mountain is the artistic collaboration between Christopher Bratton and Lindsey Fromm. Their series Spirit Travel began in May 2014 during a hike through the charred and flood-carved landscape below Horn Mesa in Northern New Mexico. The draped figure in each image exists in the mythic realm, a space between the ancient and the ephemeral. The figure begs the question: How does the corporeal body connect with the human spirit? We think when the wind drifts and whips the veil, a bridge is created to the sacred realm.