Art & Performance
Take Care of Me. I ____
2022
interactive installation with thrift-store-purchased figurines and miniature placards
exhibitions:
This piece was created as part of my colleague Dr. Jacqueline Barrios’s Book of the City project, in which students, faculty, and community artists were invited to read Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield together and create artistic responses connecting themes from the novel to our own “spatial biographies” in Tucson.
For my piece, I was inspired by a passage during which, upon arriving at school, young David is forced to wear a sign proclaiming, “Take care of him. He bites.” David first mistakes the sign as belonging to a dog, though quickly realizes he in fact must bear this mark as a punishment for defending himself against his stepfather’s abuse. He narrates:
“I came upon a pasteboard placard… [which] bore these words ‘TAKE CARE OF HIM. HE BITES.’ … What I suffered from that placard, nobody can imagine. Whether it was possible for people to see me or not, I always fancied that somebody was reading it… I positively began to have a dread of myself, as a kind of wild boy who did bite.”
In the novel, David is forced to wear this mark in shame. However, in my piece, drawing on work in queer theory and activism, I recontextualize this moment, reclaiming David’s bite as an act of righteous rebellion in response to the cruelty and discipline imparted upon him.
For this installation, I assembled a collection of figurines—viewers were invited to create their own miniaturized placards documenting traits for which they have been shamed, whether by friends, family, or society.
Viewers were thus encouraged to both reclaim experiences of stigma and humiliation and quite literally minimize them by displacing them onto these miniatures. These figurines were sourced from local thrift stores, as others’ cast off objects: at the end of this project, they were documented, but ultimately donated back, further dissipating these negative affects and granting these objects, and ourselves, the opportunity for new futures.