Installation Projects 

“housecatcat” is an interspecies collaboration between renowned artist, philosopher, and domestic cat Limbo Da Silva Costa, and his thumb wielding human assistant, Nathan Grimes. Transpiring over a span of two months, “housecatcat” manifested as a site specific installation for the exhibition/residential space at 310 W Washington St. in Champaign IL. Initially, the concept revolved around Da Silva Costa’s obsession with the visible disconnect between moral assumption and correlated evidence of feline equality. As physical elements of “housecatcat” took form with Grimes’ assistance, and Da Silva Costa focused on meditative isolation within the catcathouse structure, the conceptual impetus shifted. Beneath the shelter-in-place order universally employed due to a mounting viral pandemic, Da Silva Costa grew acutely aware of the ontological disorientation of perceived agency dynamics. Searching for traces of 1 cat = 1 cat, this situation catalyzed a philosophical dilation from distinctions of feline agential equality to human agential equality with felines, in the shadow of powerlessness cast by an omnipresent non anthro-feline entity. While the longstanding servitude of humans to felines had established a clear hierarchy, this pandemic disorientation cued new horizontally emergent scenarios of being. Da Silva Costa in true collaboration with Grimes continued down this rabbit-duck hole of disoriented thresholds characterized by physical mergers and self-similarity.

Much to the disappointment of 310 W Washington St. Gallery, the exhibition opening for “housecatcat” scheduled for May 6th 2020 has been cancelled due to COVID-19. In place of the opening reception, we’ve linked an eponymous youtube video as a conceptual distillation of the process and the site. In addition to this video, some process photographs can be found below. Be well.

Sketchy Neighbors is a site specific drawing installation that took place May - August 2020 in my living room. It was exhibited through ART-IN-PLACE (AIP), an initiative of CNL Projects and Terrain Exhibitions along with work from  over 100 other artists in the U.S. and abroad. 

Shelter-in-place creates peculiar constraints for making, exhibiting, and viewing site-specific artwork in a digitally unmediated manner. While quarantine necessarily limits mobility, it also limits perspectives to the world at large, leaving us with flattened projections on glass as our only safe access to the outdoors. When one's outdoor view is of the neighbors' window, the looking experience becomes increasingly voyeuristic and this drawing points to that relationship.

Confluence is a meditation about my lifelong habit of collecting. Within this context I was interested in exploring the origins of my habit as a coping mechanism for traumatic stress, the tears and the power of things, and the liminal spaces where narratives, like fragments collect, intersect, and at times collapse into each other.

This was an installation of objects I had collected throughout my life. Many are metonymic - representing people in my life, gifted and inherited from those people, and sometimes literal parts of those people - teeth, hair. I performed a collection of three songs I had written as well, sitting down amongst my collected things, becoming a part of them in some way. The songs were about my own trauma narrative, feeling like a fragmented thing, and feeling at one with the fragments while crouched down in a creek bed.