Mails I Can’t Send

Inkjet print on vinyl, archival inkjet prints, Polaroids, postcards, typewritten text on envelopes

Vinyl print: 6 × 9 ft;
Postcards: 30 pieces, each 4.25 × 5.5 in; Envelopes: 30 pieces, each 4 × 6 in;
Inkjet print, Polaroids, cardstock, and tape, 24 × 36 in;
Inkjet print, 24 × 36 in

Installation dimensions variable
2026

Mails I Can't Send originates from a thirty-day relationship experiment that I entered shortly after arriving in the United States. Encountering unfamiliar forms of queer intimacy and relationship structures, I found myself reconsidering previously held ideas about love, attachment, and emotional reciprocity.

The installation consists of a large-scale photograph, a collage, and a series of envelopes bearing fragments of text extracted from my diary. Throughout the thirty-day experiment, I recorded moments whenever I found myself thinking about him, producing a visual and textual archive of longing, uncertainty, and anticipation. After the relationship concluded, I typewrote these diary fragments directly onto envelopes and incorporated them into the installation. More recently, I have begun reproducing the envelopes as postcards that visitors may freely take away, extending the work's movement from private correspondence into public circulation.

For me, language originates in the desire to communicate. Yet this work is structured around moments in which communication becomes impossible. The envelope, traditionally understood as a vehicle for exchange, gradually loses its communicative function. Instead, it becomes a material record of messages that remain unanswered, emotions that fail to generate reciprocity, and relationships that unfold in only one direction. What appears to be communication ultimately reveals itself as a form of miscommunication.

By exposing intimate writings to public view, I transform personal vulnerability into a performative gesture. The work does not document the fulfillment of intimacy but lingers within the experience of waiting itself.

Ultimately, I am interested in what remains of communication once the possibility of response has disappeared. The envelopes become traces of messages suspended between sender and receiver, existing in a space where desire persists but connection remains uncertain. Through this transformation, private language is detached from its original recipient and offered to strangers, allowing personal emotion to circulate beyond the relationship that first produced it.

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