Marissa Klee-Peregon

Bricks (I’d Like to Build a Shelter) is an ongoing project in which I sew satin bricks and then use them for interventions, installations, and performances in the built environment. This project addresses moments of failure and collapse within both physical and social structures; labor, including the labor by which those structures are built, maintained, and repaired; gendered labor specifically and gender in general; safety; shelter; and white womanhood.

I use white satin for its associations with wedding dresses, opera gloves, and silky underthings, and of course with whiteness itself. Informed by my own ambivalent, conflicted relationship with white womanhood, I consider how this social category both imprisons and protects those who occupy it, colluding with other forms of whiteness and domination. I am thinking, for example, of how white cis women are positioned as victims, as innocent, or as needing protection, as a way to justify violence that upholds white supremacy, settler colonialism, transmisogyny, etc. Reflecting on the fruitless, never-ending labor of constructing and maintaining womanhood at both an individual and societal level, I have come to think of ‘proper’ white womanhood as a kind of shelter; a hole to crawl into; a “safe space” where some of us may hide and be protected, but which by its very nature must exclude others. This work is about longing for a shelter; knowing any shelter I build will someday collapse; and knowing too that my desire to hide away in safety is itself violent.

In this project, I use bricks to refer to the literal and metaphorical structures of our world, including walls, roads, and borders, as well as gender, race, and class. I make the brick soft, shiny, and lavish, while also rendering it floppy, flaccid, and non-functional. Foregrounding the labor by which physical and social structures are built and maintained, I reconstruct the moments when they droop, fail, and collapse. I explore failure as a site of possibility and pleasure, and I work with textiles for their droopiness; their frequent failure to hold their own shape; and for their pleasurable softness when held against one’s skin. Forever interested in instability, emptiness, and the desire to be filled, I turn to absence as a signal of that which might be.

Support for this project was provided by the Kalamazoo Artistic Development Initiative, a program of the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo, and by so many friends and comrades here in so-called Kalamazoo.