Intimacy of Throes

Intimacy of throes

2025 solo presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach Meridians sector with Library Street Collective

In 2024, I was commissioned to create a large-scale installation, Intimacy of Throes, for the exhibition, In an effort to be held, curated by Allison Glenn at The Shepherd. The piece was shown again in 2025 at Art Basel Miami Beach Meridians sector with Library Street Collective.

The work is shaped by the way intimacy asks us to move toward one another: not through the physical, but through the courage to enter someone’s inner world and hold what you find with care. Working with these materials—metal bent from experience, paint skins stretched like memory—I’m giving that idea a tangible form, creating a piece that highlights material contrast and exists in a liminal state of becoming.

Intimacy of throes was constructed from a 30-foot industrial trash barrel. When I found it, I knew I had to dismantle the whole to see the sum of its parts. With the help of machine jaws, we cut, bent, and reshaped the container into distinct forms. Squinting at the metal, blurring my focus just enough to see its most essential contours and edges, I began to imagine how I would reunite the forms into a gestaltist whole. It is in those moments that the act of receiving feels like being held: present, safe, guided, and within the intimacy of throes.

After painting the barrel and fragmenting it into segments, I reassembled the pieces into a “family” of five forms, exploring the tension, vulnerability, and subtle dynamics that define our earliest experiences of closeness. The piece reflects how intimacy often emerges from moments of challenge, embarrassment, or fear, with the family as the first site of such formative experiences. Formally, the piece echoes Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, embodying the coexistence of despair, courage, and collective resolve.