Press here.


Flyers I made for the reading and the show. 

Statement:

What happens when dignity is plus’d? We live, on the whole, in totally undignified states of un-repose, and most of our actions enacted for self-preservation or as a rote performance of duty can be taken as a capitulation in one way or another–as simple as sitting in traffic, or helplessly accepting some of the most unseemly aspects of the social contract, or working terminal jobs that conflict with certain, self-evident values (value no.1: meaningful engagement with the succor of living). Even our leisure activities, if pursued without care, can serve to further deplete our reserves of dignity. Attenuated from our brushes with ‘fun’ or with ‘art’, we return to paralytic arrangements that continuously strip us of our most fundamental qualia without any serviceable defenses. The distinctions between the sources of laceration and the supposed panacea lapse, collapse, converge.


These are not issues that can be resolved overnight, but perhaps it begins with a refusal.


The dead cannot be made to live again. The living shouldn’t have to play dead in order to get by. There are still so many hallowed, beautiful places that can be reactivated with attention, care, and conversation. As for the gladiatorial arenas of our life which inculcate a feeling of deadness, they are probably not worth our time, which is in ever-dwindling supply.


Why put energy into machinations that elude us and make us feel less than capable, when the equilibrium that tethers consciousness to our bodies has always been so fragile? Why do only the dead get to hang out in amorously marbled edifices, where beauty is really everywhere? Why should I have to pay this parking ticket?


I first visited this cemetery and mausoleum complex—Altadena’s oldest operating business—in the summer of 2018, when I was not quite twenty years old, and gradually, the mausoleum took on totemic importance in my life, as real and vital as any friend. It became a localized projection for the interests I had (striated genealogies, death, abjection, rot, psychic ‘spill’—what most people are into) as well as the anachronistic, lo-fi manner in which I pursued them. I took endless photographs, made castings of headstones in a variety of materials, and wrote conjectural re-tellings of the deceased’s final moments, and how they might have felt about it, filtered through my own imprecise lens. Although the demands of the outside world harangued and continued to exercise guilt upon my person, for a few hours I could pretend to be in another world entirely, with a captive audience of thousands. 

In choosing to bring a show to the mausoleum, with the active participation of many artists whom I respect and admire, years of voyeuristic graveyard explorations conducted in soporific, shuffling solitude have found a more realized form. It is not an escape but a return, to built-in zones of reverence and contemplation, however artificially heightened in their ornamental demonstrations of sacredness.


With sympathy,

Jasminne Morataya