for shimby, 2023, looping digital animation, made for Peepshow, an exhibition in the Project Gallery at the Queensland College of Art in Meanjin AU.

Experimental documentary/memoir made for my pal/chosen fam shimby, made while staying at their house on Winnipeg Street in Regina, Saskatchewan, Treaty 4, early 2024. Featuring Gwen the cat 💚💙💜

I was asked if I’d like to be in a group exhibition in Meanjin and so prompted by this project “deadline” I conjured this animation from love, as my contribution. It is made as an infinite loop, and it played on a television in the gallery.

As I was abroad during this project, Lisa Kurtz provided on-the-ground support to have my work installed/documented/deinstalled. Shout out to my art pals in Meanjin💓 I cut my teeth as an artist in 2015-2016 amidst the Brisbane arts ecology, which was always really supportive of me. This work is an overt example of my art as ode my mosaic lineages.

shimby and I are both queer, diasporic babies with mixed heritage, our identities and notions of home inherently embody a fluid multiplicity. The animation fluidly visits places significant to my lineages, tracing through the prairies of so-called Canada. Beginning in Regina, where we were, to Winnipeg, where shimby was born, where we met, and I lived at the time, to Meanjin/Brisbane AU where I spent formative years as an artist and where this work would be sent and seen, Gimuy/Cairns AU where I was born and raised, and Ifugao, my paternal ancestral homeland in the so-called Philippines. shimby had recently asked me to point out Ifugao on their wall map and choose a button to mark it. I chose a purple button, which is seen in the animation.

In early 2025, about a year after this animation was made, I helped shimby move out of this home in Regina, which had for 3.5 years been experienced as a cosy nest in which many people gathered, many artists practiced, many meals were collaboratively cooked and lovingly shared. Tears, hugs, dreams, songs. Within a prairie province marked by conservatism, we experience these shared, queer, artist-led spaces as havens. This animation continues to serve as a heartfelt documentation of a moment in time, a light offering, mapping meeting places, as Earth continues to turn, and we with it.

I wanted to make something that was a reflection of both a fleeting state, and an undying interconnectedness… a recurring theme in my work is meta-narrative, and I wanted to create something that embodied the meta-narrative of its own creation, and acknowledged why it was made. Why do we do what we do? What is it for? So I included the plans for the animation itself, the date I made it in response to the deadline I was actioned by, the places that informed the work, and my connection to the place I would be sending the work(where the audience would be standing as they viewed it), and the space and circumstances from which I was making the work… It was an interesting experiment in how to “remotely” make a work that is site-responsive. A co-existence of multiple Truths. I prefer to make site/situation-responsive work, and so for this I drew from my spatial memory of the gallery (which I had been present in many times), and the social context I was offering it into. I did this to ground myself in this being a gift that is primarily for shimby, and also expands to embody multiple existences – a gift that can traverse worlds – worlds geographically distanced, worlds existing at different points on linear timelines(but co-existing simultaneously on non-linear timelines, through the subconscious and other immeasurable ways of knowing), and also the private and the public and the “professional” worlds, and the idea that each friendship/connection is its own world.