Nicole Brunel: Every Worm Deserves a Mansion

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Nicole Suzanne Brunel, "Every Worm Deserves a Mansion," 2018

digital video still.

Dear friends and patrons,

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Exhibition Description

Beside a wall of sand, a Mountain Dew-patched character of confusing age tells bad jokes to no one. An audience of sculptures stands silently; a giant worm, an effigy to stink bombs, and a diagnosis from the 80th dimension. These statues are bodily in form, idolized jokes constructed from the infrastructural detritus of a city buried by a desert. The metal is reused, concrete is rotten, and sand is hot and mutant. String encrusted by this sand tries to stand and lift. Bows mark points of interdimensional intersections. Cookie marks the spot. Mom is missed.

In the distance, a visible suspension of carbon can be seen coming from a camp. Its fire is still glowing but no one’s sure how long it’s been here. There are traces of human and baby energy left to be decoded; a green screened turtleneck, a 4:3 mushroom cloud, and keyframed soft marble car seats. Touching the sand here, it’s ticklish and trying its best not to tell a secret. The fire betrays this intention, emitting a digital language translated through smoke. Fuzzy and looping narrators act as guides through puzzles in the plume. Every Worm Deserves a Mansion is a prediction and a recounting of a sugar-fueled ascent to the nth dimension.

Biographies 

Nicole uses sculpture, music, video, and coding to create spaces of alternate reality. These spaces are defined by mutability; of identity, of humour, and of dimension.Their stories speak of similarities between non-binary gender, wave-particle duality, and carabiners.

Christopher Robert Jones is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Illinois. Their research is centered around the ‘failure’ or ‘malfunctioning’ of the body and how those experiences are situated at points of intersection between queer and crip discourses. Using sculpture, installation, textual, and performance strategies, their work aims to create ruptures in the layers of cultural/political/historical sediment through which compulsory normativity and compulsory ablebodiedness are disseminated. Christopher received B.A.s in Art Studio and Technocultural studies from UC Davis and is currently a M.F.A. candidate at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.