chimaera.site/afk, 2023

chimaera.site/afk was a temporary creative community space in the Lloyd Center mall, from May 4-19, 2023.
It was host to an art exhibition; a market with goods by local creatives; interactive elements to encourage folks to hang out (like a digital arcade wall, art supplies, a couch, tables, a sticker trading box, and free zines); as well as free programming, including workshops, artist talks, performances, a movie night, and more.

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chimaera.site/afk was a response to several things, including both frustrations and momentum that arose from my thesis year for my MFA in Visual Studies and MA in Critical Studies at PNCA. As the title implies, it is an afk [“away from keyboard”] piece of my larger, digital project, chimaera.site—which explores constructions of reality.

A requirement of my VS degree was to have a public exhibition of my artwork. i knew that i did not want my queer prose games to live in a traditional white cube gallery space where the people I want to play them would not encounter them; and i particularly did not want them to live in either of the two galleries where the MFA thesis exhibitions took place, both of which i have specific, values-based concerns about being connected to. excitingly, this opened up the opportunity for me to build a new place for those games to exist, and to do so really intentionally.

i’ve referred to what’s happening at the Lloyd Center mall as “the slowly reanimating husk of capitalism”, and likened it to a carpenter ant that has been commandeered by ophiocordyceps unilateralis (the “zombie ant” fungus). Without any “anchor” stores, its partially hollow body is being driven by some holdovers from my teen days like Hot Topic and Cinnabon, but then there’s ILY2too, Floating World Comics, Musique Plastique, Family Photo Studio, Mortal Emblem, Dreem Street—all owned by genuinely rad weirdos (which i say with admiration, weirdos are the only people i have any desire to interact with). Wandering through the Lloyd center there are areas that really give liminal backrooms vibes—but then you’ll encounter tiny occupations of millennials trying to navigate survival by constructing spaces of creativity and joy. they may still be commerce-focused, but there’s something happening that doesn’t feel directly like capitalism.

With the theme of my larger, ongoing body of work being chimaera, it seemed only appropriate that i too graft myself onto this slowly mutating creature of (im)possibility, and that i bring along as many weirdos as possible. So i rented the space next to Hot Topic for two weeks.

i put out several calls: a call for exhibition artwork, a call for market goods, a call for creative residencies in the window spaces, and a call for workshops + events, all themed around (any) interpretation of chimaera. My hope was to give an adequate home to my games, and to counteract some of the isolation of my primarily digital research + art practices—but what ended up being most impactful for me was meeting the chimaera that was constructed from our individual interpretations of what it means to be a chimaera. each artist statement / event / interaction expanded my understanding of what it could mean to occupy a collective, mutable body, and how much power there is in that.

WE NEED THESE SPACES!!!!!

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I am still working to archive everything that happened in those two weeks, but you can find the growing documentation at http://chimaera.site/afk.