Joy Portals

Four installations at public locations in Jefferson County
Through Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
August 2024 - December 2024

Creating an environment for, finding, and being vulnerable enough to give in to joy has always been a difficult thing for me. As I’ve aged, and have accumulated more hardship, joy has felt more and more elusive… like I’ve had to actively chase it. Something I noticed early on in a recent (five year ongoing) process of healing from trauma, anxiety, and depression is that access to joy felt like a wildly important, if not the most important, antidote for me. Not necessarily just feeling joyful, but the personal agency, process, and confidence to access joy. I realized that the more I experimented with ways to access joy, the more confident, secure, and healed I felt – a slow domino effect.

Access to joy feels to me like both a practice and a serendipity. Like there are fleeting moments when it becomes available. The moment is right, the day is right, the brain chemicals are right – and my joy instigators cross paths, or take root. And it takes practice to grab hold of them.

The best way I know how to describe the moments of harnessing and accessing joy, is that it feels like I’m entering (or bypassing) joy portals. Like they’re available to me at different frequencies, and I have to figure out how to fall into them. The ability to experiment with, improvise on, and feel agency over how to harness our own joy feels like one of the most important medicines. If hope is a discipline (as Mariame Kaba says), joy is a practice. Something all our own and built for us, by us.

With these installations, I am visually exploring what practicing access to joy has felt like for me.

Feel

1 of 4 installations / at Centre Stage in Evergreen, CO
2024
raw canvas, ottertex canvas
30 ft x 8ft

Feel is about what it feels like to give in. To really feel when the joy portal comes around, to take the gamble. To be afraid, to be excited, to let the domino effect happen, and to harness the joy all I can.