ten feet at a time

by Sam Machia Keshet 

Exhibition: March 19 - 23, 2024

Reception: Friday, March 22nd, 6-8p

This body of work recognizes the incremental process of change and growth. It is slow, it is uncomfortable, it is clumsy and imperfect, and we are pursued and propelled in turn by the people we move through it with. ten feet at a time is an invitation to exist in this space as a different person for a few minutes and inhabit new ways of being a body among other bodies. It is meant as a chance to question:

Where do we go from here? What do we owe each other? How do we move forward together? What do we miss when we choose to go alone?

This work would not exist without women’s flat track roller derby – the place where I learned that we are always transforming and negotiating relationships of power, and that is a gift. It is not about roller derby, but it is unquestionably the product of my experience there, and that is the vantage point from which it is made.

More About Sam

What I care about most as a human is that I build with others. In a nonlinear way of becoming, we find moments of collective liberation through compassion, humor, curiosity, and reverence for the unfixedness of one another's' beings. Bodies and objects and languages transformed create new universes, space for those who come after. One cannot exist without that which came before it, and so the simple act of being is evidence of the interconnectedness that is critical to liberation. I see collective dreaming as a gift of queerness, queerness as a gift of the reach for liberation—bell hooks expands on the definition of queerness as being about “the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” I want us all to speak, and thrive, and live.

In making objects and situations, I am given the chance to materialize “otherness” and visions of what is possible as an act of care for my own being and the being of others. In asking questions of identity, alienation, and community - and pulling at the connections between them - my role is creator of queer body, curator of queer event, caretaker of queer object. Archivist and attendant of the world in its inherent weirdness and wonder.