Hand saw body slant

“Rough work, soft touch”

This writing accompanies my MFA show, “Rough work, soft touch,” in the Ana Mendieta Gallery in April of 2026. Carpentry guidebooks teach you how to man-handle with a firm grip. Deconstructing the didactic language and instructional images of the construction manual, my work adjusts their intended function, inverts their authority, and queers their use. “Rough work, soft touch” is a schematic drawing, looping between the manual’s diction and my contradiction. Establishing the body as both the site of construction and the tool, I explore what it means to dance in the trace while embodying a different fullness. The correctness and precision associated with woodworking, printmaking, and gender performance become a rigid surface to sand away, reveal, and omit through approximation and splintering.

These prints, ceramic impressions, paintings, video performances, and sculptures reproduce bodies on the edge of rubbing up against something to build a sense of momentum, motion, and a heavy kind of groundlessness with a transmasculine slant. Like trying to jump in steel-toe boots. Allowing viewers to project themselves upon the silhouettes and surrogate bodies, I ask onlookers to become ondo-ers. By engaging our bodies in the abstraction of the instructed action, the form of the how-to book is expanded into queer space.

This body of work encompasses the full margins of my thinking; handyman poetics, antithetical annotations, and analyses of queer theory provide the structure underpinning it all. The grid of the graph paper, the hands performing the gestures, and the architecture temporarily erected lay the ground for new possibilities outside of singular, linear resolve. I ask you to act alongside me—copy me copying him; along the way the referent runs out, and the fractured body deconstructs the absolute value of the original.