Stacking Traumas builds on a recent series of drawings that deal with trauma in the Deaf community. Can you describe the piece?
It’s a stack of three tables or, rather, traumas. These tables are made of musical notes with long stems and bars, and these turn into one big table (or collective trauma). Each table symbolizes a three-word term: Dinner Table Syndrome, Hearing People Anxiety, Alexander Graham Bell. It’s like trauma upon trauma upon trauma.
Bell of course is remembered for inventing the telephone, but he was also an educator who opposed teaching sign language to Deaf children. Is it fair to say that his legacy, represented by the topmost table, continues to exert an influence?
Alexander Graham Bell is probably the biggest source of trauma for the Deaf community in a historical sense. I am therefore very pleased to be given the opportunity to use this particular wall space, since the size and architecture give volume to a specter that looms over Deaf people’s heads, whether you can see it or not.
You’ve noted that, in a culture built for the hearing, being Deaf is inherently political. You’ve also described your focus on “finding a way to be both an artist and an activist.” Are there tensions between those two roles, and if so, how do you navigate them?
Deaf people are forced to navigate and negotiate all the time; in that sense I think that I have always been both an artist and an activist. That very tension is political and multilayered. I might be more of an artist in some situations and more of an activist in others. For the Super Bowl gig, I thought I acted as an activist, but the audiences perceived me as an artist. I guess I am an activist because of my art platform.
One thing I have definitely understood this year more than ever is that communicating through both written words and interpreters is the best way for me to exercise my place and to stay relevant.