These aren’t just photographs of bodies doing things in rooms, they’re evidence of something that mattered, at least for one night, in a living room that was never the same afterward.
Kelly Rafferty, Michael Hunter, Derek Phillips, Niki Ulehla, Angrette McCloskey and Raegan Truax… these aren’t just names that matter to seventeen people in the Bay Area art scene. These are people who showed up to make something happen in real time, with real bodies, in real space.
Angrette’s Vessel. Christ, the Vessel. This magnificent structure she rebuilt, not built, rebuilt, meaning it had a life before, died somewhere else, and got resurrected in this domestic space. Living rooms aren’t supposed to contain vessels. They’re supposed to contain couches and disappointment and the faint smell of whoever used to live there before. But Angrette made it hold something else, made it become something else, turned that room into a cathedral for one night.
We had this whole other performance mapped out, Angrette and I. This pilgrimage with the Vessel, dragging it to the ocean where the light does that thing at dusk, hauling it into the redwoods where the scale of everything gets cosmically rearranged, planting it downtown where the indifference of the city could either destroy it or make it mean something it never meant before. The Vessel at Big Sur. The Vessel in Muir Woods with those cathedral trees making it look suddenly small, suddenly human scaled in a way that’s almost unbearable. The Vessel on Market Street with people walking past it like it’s not even there.
But it didn’t happen. Of course it didn’t happen. Because these conversations, these late night planning sessions where everything seems possible and the logistics haven’t murdered the dream yet, they’re their own art form. The phantom projects. The ones that exist perfectly in that space between intention and execution, where they never have to confront reality’s tedious insistence on things like transportation and permits and the fact that Angrette probably had a life.
And then there’s Niki, working with microorganisms. Microorganisms. I’m standing there with a camera, this machine designed to capture light and form and gesture, and she’s conjuring something that exists at a scale the human eye can’t even properly register without technological assistance. Performance art about the invisible, the microbial, the stuff that’s crawling all over us and inside us and making us possible but we can’t see it.
How do I photograph that? How do I document a performance about something my camera can’t even resolve? I’m capturing Niki’s body, her movements, whatever physical vocabulary she’s using to invoke these tiny lives. But the actual subject, the microorganisms themselves, they’re absent from the frame. They have to be. So I’m documenting a translation of a translation, a performance about something rather than a documentation of something. All metaphor and approximation. All faith that something real is being conjured even though nobody can prove it.
Michael Hunter working through Cage, because someone’s always doing Cage at these things, and sometimes it even matters. The careful language of “new work” and “installations” and “environments” that tries to avoid saying what’s actually going on, which is people standing in rooms making shapes with their bodies and believing it means something.
And maybe, maybe, these salons, these careful gatherings where everyone knows everyone, maybe they’re not about making something that lasts. Maybe they’re about creating a space where failure isn’t just accepted but elevated, sanctified, turned into its own kind of sacrament.
The Gertrude Stein quote sitting at the bottom of this post like a land mine: “A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.” Which is either the most honest thing anyone’s ever said about performance art or the most elaborate excuse ever constructed. But now I think it’s about something else entirely. Not failure as surrender, but failure as its own kind of completeness. The Vessel that stayed in one place and somehow went everywhere. The microorganisms that couldn’t be photographed but somehow were. The moments that died the instant they were performed but keep breathing in these frozen fragments.
I chose black and white because I understand something about the quality of attention in that room. The grain, the contrast, the way bodies emerge from and dissolve back into shadow, I was translating the actual temperature of the moment. These images are haunted by what’s not in them: the Vessel’s ghost road trip through California, the microorganisms doing their invisible dance, all the conversations and intentions that never quite became the things we planned.
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“A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.” Gertrude Stein said that, and honestly it’s the perfect fucking epigraph for whatever this whole thing became. If you want the big picture, all fourteen nights of beautiful, messy failure, there’s a page for that.
Salon #5 is next. More work. More pretending we knew what we were doing.
Or go back: Salon #3, the one with the bricks and the grief.