Secondhand Smoke
Interiors and Exteriors
Secondhand Smoke was a solo exhibition for my MFA thesis in 2018 at The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. It consisted of two rooms, one green and one pink. On the 18-foot tall gallery walls were long sheets of hand-dyed hand-printed wallpaper paired with graphite drawings investigating the concept of “The Witch.” In this context, “The Witch” was my maternal grandmother Azael Bettis whose violence and psychosis reverberate through my family to this day.
Rotting Family Photos
Images in the first room in the exhibition are taken from family photos that feature either me, my mother, her mother, or close female family members. Hidden messages and meanings are meant to reveal themselves over time. This image of is of Azael and is the only one that displays her face, though her body appears in other pieces in the exhibition.
Like Mother like Mother like Mother
While I never experienced my grandmother’s mental illness firsthand (the show is titled “Secondhand Smoke), it hid in the shadows of how my mother spoke about her childhood. It colored how she raised and protected her children, with ferocious love and one eye on the ticking timebomb in their brain chemistry. While Bipolar disorder drove the other women in our family mad, my mother kept me and my youngest sibling states away.
With next to no happy female family members to model myself after, womanhood came to represent madness in my mind.
Heresiographs
Another visual inspiration for Secondhand Smoke was visual displays of heresy from the 15th to the 17th centuries from the height of the European Witchcraft Hysteria. Images of what witches and demons allegedly did to good little children, or on their midnight travels to the witch’s sabbat appear in every drawing.
Alluding to familial boogeymen and unexplained events that haunt the corners of our genetic nightmares, the demons and witches in Secondhand Smoke speak on the problem many female-identifying people must manage every day: Am I being a bitch right now? Am I angry because I’m PMSing or am I angry because I am experiencing injustice? Am I able to feel and express myself, no matter how messy, without being demonized and pathologized?
Inside
The Witch is Unleashed
The Witch is a Portal
Within the beating heart of Secondhand Smoke is the unbridling power of the primordial witch. She exists in various states of skinned, undress and absence. She can travel beyond the veil to worlds only dreamt of in your dirtiest wet dreams.
She is violent and putrid, but without shame. She is herself.
Deep Within the Woods
Creatures and witches are in a state of becoming, stretching, and flexing to grow to their full power. The flames of hell deep within the cosmic wilderness are brilliant curtains on a stage presenting the star of the show.
As disgraced rapper, Kanye West, once said, “That’s my bipolar shit, *** That’s my superpower, *** ain’t no disability. I’m a superhero! I’m a superhero!”
Pregnant with Possibility
There were many reasons for the Witchcraft Trials in Europe. The protestant reformation left a once strong religious/political institution splintered. Europe was emerging from a period of cold and famine called The Little Iceage. Once trials became known by the greedy and desperate, accusations of witchcraft were used to cleanse communities of undesirables: those with desirable land, those with empty bellies, those who looked at you the wrong way, and those with inconvenient mental illnesses. But regardless of an accuser’s personal motives, there was a general consensus that something was coming; The End. Armageddon. The spiritual anxiety of Europe in many ways mirrored my own at the time of Secondhand Smoke.
View the exhibition below
