Hollis McConkey

How can I render visible an experience that is, by definition, invisible? How do I reconcile everything I have done, felt, been, in a body and mind that lives in flux? What can my future look like? In an attempt to address and make sense of these questions, I Feel Tender unsettles and challenges heteronormative/ableist conceptions of time and body by proposing alternative ways of being through the lenses of crip time and experience.

I reference my past(s), present(s), and future(s) by approaching my experience as an athlete and chronically ill woman as elements that make up a whole (myself) rather than particular moments in my life that have come and gone in linear fashion. I throw memories, objects, and experiences into a state of flux, each a glimpse of myself in a moment of time, never gone and always changing and negotiating the space around one another. My experience of time occurs in and through my body and mind; planning, forgetting, anticipating, resting, thinking, feeling, resisting, negotiating; everything is taking place at once in the present, past, and future. I Feel Tender is a love letter to myself and my body/mind’s innate and constant care work. By exploring this simultaneity and multiplicity in a new and imagined space outside of myself, I also propose a space to imagine crip futures. The multiplicity of medium and form (print, video, collage, photogrammetry, etc.) allow the possibility of every aspect of I Feel Tender to become past, present, and/or future, depending on individual perspective. All I ask is that my audience approaches my work with the willingness to see all aspects at once, and in doing so, can begin to imagine crip futures.

This work is intended to be viewed in an installation setting at full length (00:06:48) in order to establish a relationship to the body.