Mud & Blue
Mud & Blue takes the physicality of post-Hurricane Harvey Houston as a starting point to consider the murky, muddy ambiguity of emotional life and affective politics within artistic community. In a series of five events, Mud & Blue combines spoken word narrative essay and poetry with video screenings by contemporary artists engaging questions of landscape, politics, and affect. This is an expansive curatorial project that is rhizomatic and anti-institutional in nature. Screening/performing these works at public spaces and community venues around Houston, the events also blur divisions between artist and curator, performer and viewer, art audience and Houston communities. Including video, performance, and sound works by artists/writers from Houston, Guatemala City, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and San Salvador, Mud & Blue looks to earth and the color blue as suggestive materials for considering what life in a post-disaster city might entail. It suggests a political weariness, mitigated by shared efforts at healing or cleanup, at recovery through notions of community. Simultaneously, it allows for the problematics of such notions of community and recovery--the muddiness of the proposition of a city-wide cleanup effort--in its interrogation of bad feelings, exhaustion, sadness, and apathy--that is, the feelings that are the impetus for the blues.
Mud & Blue
NOVEMBER 2018: Mud & Blue takes the physicality of post-Hurricane Harvey Houston as a starting point to consider the murky, muddy ambiguity of emotional life and affective politics within artistic community. In a series of five events, Mud & Blue combines spoken word narrative essay and poetry with video screenings by contemporary artists engaging questions of landscape, politics, and affect. This is an expansive curatorial project that is rhizomatic and anti-institutional in nature. Screening/performing these works at public spaces and community venues around Houston, the events also blur divisions between artist and curator, performer and viewer, art audience and Houston communities. Including works by artists/writers from Houston, Guatemala City, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and San Salvador, Mud & Blue looks to earth and the color blue as suggestive materials for considering what life in a post-disaster city might entail. It suggests a political weariness, mitigated by shared efforts at healing or cleanup, at recovery through notions of community. Simultaneously, it allows for the problematics of such notions of community and recovery--the muddiness of the proposition of a city-wide cleanup effort--in its interrogation of bad feelings, exhaustion, sadness, and apathy--that is, the feelings that are the impetus for the blues.