Shared Custody Tour

When my parents divorced, my family split between New York and Arizona. Traveling between them, I got good at navigating the airport but not my feelings. Coping strategies of numbing and avoidance developed alongside an affinity for heavy music, and one grew to provide release for the other. At live shows, engaging in a community gathered to empathize with expression onstage helped me begin breaking down those numbing and avoidant mechanisms. Hard vocals inspire tenderness, as one song lyric shouts, “I carried the watermelon, I want to be vulnerable.” This community is composed of “others” signaling back and forth to form connection. One such signal is the graphic t-shirt. Comedian Luke Severeid describes it as walking through the world pointing to your own chest, “This is a band that I like. Do you like a thing that I like? Can we talk about it in the middle of this produce aisle?”​ Shared Custody Tour uses that dynamic of relating to others. It started as a series of free-written journal entries about my experience with divorce, and a feelings wheel helped identify emotional expressions in the writing. Each one is transformed into a silkscreen printed t-shirt inspired by heavy metal and punk, genres characterized by highly detailed and nearly illegible artwork. Reading what is seen can be as difficult as deciphering what is felt. Accompanying them is a song-cover turned sound-collage that immerses viewers in a blend of memory and environment. All of it is anchored by a stage set to support someone ready to share their vulnerable self. The work is lovingly dedicated to my parents, all four of them, and none of it is raised as a blaming finger. Rather, it points to my own chest, saying, “This is a thing that I feel. Do you feel a thing that I feel? Can we talk about it?”​