Siobhan Hebron

November 12, 2017

TwoSixtyNine was a durational piece I did in 2017 for the Los Angeles iteration of the Terrain Biennial in which I fell the distance that Ana Mendieta fell to her death. It was formed from a passage in Naked by the Window: “Later, a physicist would calculate that Ana had fallen 269 feet in 4.21 seconds; at the moment of impact, her velocity was 120 miles per hour. As a result, almost all her bones were shattered and all her major organs lacerated, including her brain and her heart.”

The performance lasted 90 minutes. Thank you to Allison Stewart for all performance documentation.

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The Terrain Biennial is an international exhibition of site-specific art made for front yards, balconies, and porches. The Los Angeles event is sponsored by the Association of Hysteric Curators, an artist collective dedicated to advancing the lives of feminist artists.

The Terrain Biennial Los Angeles will have two distinct openings. Sunday, October 1st, at the Mimosa Drive location, features the work of Tawny Featherston. This work is installed in the carport and accessible for viewing day and night, until October 26th. The Biennial continues with a performance and installation day on November 12th, at both the Mimosa Drive and Crestmoore Place locations, as well as the footpath connecting the two, with events influenced by the mythology, ritual, and magic embodied in the artwork of the late Ana Mendieta. The November 12th event will include the work of over twenty Los Angeles-based performance artists and will premiere site-specific installation pieces by Rachel Finkelstein, Christine Dianne Guiyangco, Emily Sudd, and Kim Truong. Guiyangco Truong and Sudd’s installations will be viewable from the street throughout the month of November.

Tampons & Tweets is a resistance and reaction series. After Trump’s obsession with women and blood was pointed out by artist Simone Leigh, I became hyper aware of it. Not long after, Josh Marshall’s piece "Blood and Ruin" came out dealing with precisely that topic and thus, the president’s obsession became my obsession.

I have paired tampons and subsequently the blood that my body has expelled with his simultaneously sent tweets. His unimpaired male ego matched with my unimpaired female biology. His perceived power/(in)ability v.s. my actual power/(in)ability.*

I also know that menstruation or the image of a bloody tampon is what would truly offend Trump, his administration, and the conservative right the most, especially when paired with Trump’s words via his most prized form of communication. Truly innocuous and inoffensive though it is, as it was also recently pointed out, (I regret to say I forget by who) menstrual blood is the only blood that does not come from violence, it still seems to be the base of all of women’s offenses to men. And since this administration is all about going back to basics, one of my artistic desires is thus to offend them at their most basic misogynistic, puritanical core. I find myself coming back to the article "Becoming Ugly" by Madeleine Davies and the line “I WANT TO OFFEND YOUR SIGHT. I WANT TO OFFEND YOUR EVERYTHING.”

*Note: I created this series in part because I am hyper-aware of my sick body; having not bled for around a year while on chemotherapy, and because I consider myself infertile due to that treatment.

Regardless, I recognize that this is a very essentialist/cis-gendered series and that not every self-identified woman has the ability to defy Trump in this way should they even want to. I hope it is clear that the work is pandering only to the narrow biologically essentialist views of the man who sent the tweets, and does not reflect that of my own.

In solidarity with all of my (re)sisters.

A group of artists from around the world collaborating to provide data, resources, and visualizations regarding the gender inequity in contemporary galleries internationally. 

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