Commissioned billboard

I've always been moved by the ways that we can translate text into image and image into text. Hysterical Intimacies are a series I started to make after I finished my book manuscript: 'Touch Me, I'm Sick: Essays on Hysterical Intimacies.' Hysterical intimacies are the queer, crip modes of caring for ourselves and others that resist and outright challenge the ableist pathologizing logics of cisheteronormativity. This is another name for intimacy that is not threatened by “contradictory desires," excess, and the messiness of living with complex trauma.

In my book, I write: "All intimacy is, in part, hysterical because when we step into intimacy, we take the risk of being deemed 'too much' for someone else. In the landscape of hysterical intimacies, there’s a key difference: within this exchange, in which I expose myself before you and you choose to stick around, you also celebrate my too muchness. When it comes to hysterical intimacies, there’s no such thing as over-sharing. If what I’ve shared 'exceeds' the boundaries of what is deemed 'normal' you, my intimate person, do not feel what I’ve shared is too much."

I'm frankly exhausted by the argument that trauma threatens intimacy. Hysterical intimacies work from the belief that trauma doesn’t have to threaten interdependence; rather, naming and recognizing trauma can help us foster intimacy. Hysterical intimacies recognize that interdependence enables us to resist and heal from the systemic and individual traumas that have made us sick. Within the landscape of hysterical intimacies, the sick body receives the care and intimacy it so deserves.

What better way to represent hysterical intimacies than with furbies? These little weirdos evoke much ambivalence: you love them, hate them, feel unsettled by them. I, personally, find them adorable. Using backdrops created from images in vintage magazines, I staged these furbies in various scenes of intimacy with one another. Then, I uploaded the images to canva - the same way that I make my memes for my account @softcore_trauma - and overlaid some of my writing on top. In this way, they are meant to replicate the found images I source through pinterest, while evoking the still life.

Project dates : April 2024 - October 2024

Location:

The Bows

2001b 10th Ave SW

Image credit to: Danny Luong (@dny.lu)