in-progress
Video, 35mm photographs, found photography, ceramic, thermoplaster polyester
14:47
If No Clouds, Then Stars, and Then the Cosmos is a body of work that is part of a larger, in-progress serial project mapping California’s history using the valleys of the state and their pasts as ancient sea beds. If No Clouds, focuses on San José and accesses its history through the archives at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library at San Jose State University. Prioritizing often-ignored narratives -- those whose lives are negatively marked by the brutal inventions of race, gender and class -- the research begins to meld with speculative narratives drawn from the mateirals themselves.
This work takes the form of a sort of alien ghost story and traces an unlikely line between forms of indigenous time-telling in the valley through the use of the stars and planets, LGBTQIA+ resistance in the Santa Clara Valley as expressed through ideologically opposite groups like High Tech Gays and the Bill de Frank LGBTQ Community Center, protests at the school and its environs in the second half of the 20th century, the role of Christianity in the town in its forms both colonial and as ally in the fight for socialism, Japanese internment, early environmental movements, and technology (from agriculture to the microchip) as a dominant force in shaping the geography and history of San José.
