‘Instructions to the Other from the Mother’

Kate Howe, 2023, Site-specific Installation at RuptureXIBIT for ‘Lawless Imagination’, waxed kraft paper, lights, wire, bin bags.

“In some relationship to the non-binary creatures of the Erotics of Power series, these beings enfleshed in the deep space of the black box theater in RuptureXIBIT. Maybe related, all of them bear a streak of blue. Are they communicating? Are the smaller ones attacking the bigger one? What is the relationship here? Some seem subverting, of shape, of pattern, of behavior. I’m not entirely sure they like being imprinted upon.

I was thinking a lot about the generational policing of women’s bodies, toxic lessons handed down from the position of benevolent sexism, a deeply baked in bias we brush into our daughter’s hair at night. I was thinking about these acts of care, these acts of teaching, these lines of safety, security, and performity we transmit, the safety they seem to offer, the blind we are in as we receive them, the way they smear like lipstick if you do something you aughtn’t. The stain they leave.”

-Kate Howe on this piece and performance ‘Fidelity loss Inevitable’.