Performance Rituals
The Body as Archive, the Everyday as Sacred Act
My performance rituals did not begin as performances. They began as life. Long before I understood that what I was doing could be named within an art context, I was already living inside the logic that would later define this chapter: that the actual experience is the work of art. I did not arrive at performance through theatrical action, documentation, or public declaration. I arrived through repetition, care, offering, cultivation, and attention. These were not gestures staged for visibility. They were gestures lived for necessity.
Only later did I understand that I had been building a lifelong performance of daily life.
Unlike earlier series that move through image, system, object, or inscription, the performance rituals refuse containment. They cannot be hung on walls in the same way. They cannot be fully archived. They do not resolve into singular objects. They unfold through time, through bodies, through relationships, through seasons, through accumulation and loss. They do not separate art from living. They dissolve the boundary completely.
Ritual as Structure, Not Symbol
Ritual, in this work, is not reenactment of inherited ceremony. It is structure without dogma. It is a frame that allows meaning to circulate through ordinary acts without requiring performance for audience. It is composed of repeated gestures that acquire gravity through duration rather than spectacle.
Ritual is how the body remembers what the intellect cannot hold on its own.
In my practice, ritual is not used to symbolize belief. It is used to stabilize attention. It anchors presence inside change. It allows something to persist without fixing it.
Ritual of Giving: Art as Circulation Rather Than Possession
The Ritual of Giving begins in 2002, but its ethical intelligence long predates the formal naming of the project. From its earliest incarnation, making food to share with others, it emerged from a simple conviction: that to give is to enact relation without requiring equivalence. Giving interrupts the economy of accumulation. It replaces commodity logic with exchange that cannot be measured.
When I began creating small works to give away, particularly the early ink drawings offered to fellow graduate students, the gesture was not symbolic. It was infrastructural. The artwork did not function as artifact to be owned but as conduit of relation.
Later, after my MFA, when this ritual evolves into portrait-based works of individuals who have passed through my life, the logic remains unchanged. These portraits are not commissions. They are acknowledgments. The work moves from me toward another without transactional expectation. It circulates rather than collects.
Within the larger architecture of my practice, so invested in systems, networks, and interconnection, the Ritual of Giving becomes the lived enactment of those principles. Here, circulation is not metaphor. It is behavior. The artwork does not seek permanence through preservation. It seeks continuity through relation.
This is performance not as event, but as ethics sustained over time.
In My Garden – The DNA of Memory: Cultivation as Living Archive
As a child I saved seeds to help others in need. I viewed seeds as magical depositories of potential. In My Garden begins in 1988 in my home in Newton Massachusetts as physical practice long before it becomes named as conceptual work. Each year I plant. Each year I save seeds. Each year I watch what returns altered yet recognizable. Over decades, this has become one of the most precise metaphors in my entire universe: memory as reproductive intelligence rather than static record.
Seeds do not preserve the past intact. They translate it. They carry memory forward in altered form. They are both archive and mutation. They are continuity without stasis.
This is why I understand plants as holding the DNA of memory, both literally and philosophically. The garden is not an image of the past. It is the past made operative in the present. It changes as it returns. It adapts. It fails. It surprises. It reorganizes itself without narrative.
The In My Garden performances, often private, sometimes shared, are not demonstrations. They are participation in life’s recursive intelligence. The body here is not representational. It is laboring, tending, waiting, returning. Time becomes seasonal rather than linear. Memory becomes cyclical rather than archival.
In the larger context of my work, the garden is the living counterpart to roots, networks, and canopies. It is where abstraction touches soil directly. It is where the living system no longer operates as image but as organism.
The Lint Project: The Sacredness of the Overlooked
The Lint Project is one of the quietest and most radical works in my entire practice. It begins without announcement: I begin saving lint from the family dryer, tiny accumulations of fiber, dust, hair, skin, plant matter, particles from both inside and outside the home. At first, the act is intuitive. Soon, it becomes ritual.
Lint is the residue of living. It is what remains after the visible garment has been stripped of its presence. It is the archive of touch without image. It carries the microscopic evidence of bodies, animals, environments, and labor, compressed into something normally discarded without attention.
By saving it, I interrupt the habit of erasure.
The Lint Project is a performance of noticing. It insists that what is smallest is not what is least. It insists that the body leaves behind more than what it can ever account for. The lint becomes an index of shared existence. It carries every being that has passed through the house, human, animal, inside, outside, intermingled without hierarchy.
In this sense, lint becomes a material equivalent of the neuromorphic field: distributed, hybrid, irreducible to singular ownership. It is choreography without intention. It is record without authorship.
This is performance at its most stripped. It does not require witness. It does not require display. It requires only continuation.
The Body as Instrument of Continuity
Across all three performance rituals, the body is not objectified as image. It is mobilized as carrier of memory, act, care, and endurance. The body cooks, gives, plants, waits, collects, saves, and returns. It does not perform for visibility. It performs for survival.
This returns us to the deepest architecture of my entire practice: that embodiment is not something that appears only when the figure is drawn or painted. Embodiment is present wherever repetition meets attention.
In my painting practice, the body often appears through trace, surface, system, and pattern. In the performance rituals, the body appears through behavior.
Time as the Primary Medium
Unlike my other series, where time enters through photography or through painted accumulation, gestural density, or layered inscription, in the performance rituals time is the primary medium itself. There is no compression of duration into surface. Duration remains duration. Years are required. Seasons are required. Loss is required. Return is required.
This is not documentation-driven work. It is faith-driven work, but faith not in transcendence. Faith in continuation.
The Ethics of the Everyday
What unites Ritual of Giving, In My Garden, and The Lint Project is not aesthetic resemblance. It is ethical coherence. Each insists that the everyday is not neutral. Each insists that attention transforms use. Each insists that meaning is not generated by scale or spectacle, but by duration, repetition, and care.
These works do not elevate the extraordinary. They consecrate the ordinary.
Structural Placement Within the Larger Practice
Within the architecture of my entire universe, the performance rituals occupy the moral core. They are where the principles articulated across decades of images become lived commitments rather than visual propositions.
Systems circulate in NeuroMorphic Universe.
Care shelters in Canopy.
Encounter faces us in Face Pattern.
Speech insists in Lo Que Tengo Que Decir.
But in Performance Rituals, all of those logics leave the surface of the artwork and enter lived time.
This is where the work becomes inseparable from the life.
Why Performance Rituals Still Matter
The Performance Rituals remain alive in my practice because they are not projects with endpoints. They are conditions I continue to inhabit. I continue to give. I continue to plant. I continue to save what is overlooked. I continue to enact memory as behavior rather than representation.
If Americana–Hispana taught me that objects carry memory, if Construction / Deconstruction / Reconstruction taught me that collapse generates new order, if Making Roots taught me that belonging grows through displacement, if NeuroMorphic Universe taught me that intelligence circulates across all scales, if Retablos taught me that meaning sometimes needs a door, if Paintings for Children and Other Adults taught me that wonder opens depth rather than closes it, if Face Pattern taught me that the human surface is a living archive, if Canopy taught me that I had always lived beneath protection, and if Lo Que Tengo Que Decir taught me that the work must eventually speak, then Performance Rituals teaches me the final and most difficult lesson of all:
That nothing I make matters
unless how I live is also part of the work.
First are my images from ‘The Ritual of Giving‘:
In My Garden – the DNA of Memory:
Many of these works have the actual DNA of the plants that I nurtured while I was walking in my garden. I used encaustic wax to paint and seal the DNA. In other cases, I used acrylic medium after I had dried the plant for over a year.
