Pink Hell
Sketch concepts for Pink Hell as an installation
Evidence of the aforementioned pink storm shelter
Pink Hell is one of those projects that I look back on and recognize as a turning point in my creative practice. It started, as many good things do, in an unlikely place: a storm shelter that my friend had converted into what I can only describe as a girl shed. It was filled with pink light, mismatched lamps, decorations, and a laptop somehow pulling internet from the main house. We would go down there, drink beer, and just exist together in that glowing pink space. In this blog you will see documentation and vlogs from that time period as well as my current reflections on the project.
Footage captured along Flood in Norman, Oklahoma 2017
What followed was what I now call my pink phase, and it spanned several years beginning around 2016. I started by posting ambiguous, looping GIFs on Tumblr, scenes from my everyday life soaked in a pink tint. The aesthetic was dreamy and strange, and I found a small but real community around it. Discovering that other color-themed pages existed, like turquoise blogs and similar accounts, made me realize that people genuinely orbit around a color when it means something to them.
From those early loops, I began moving deeper into video experimentation, exploring glitch aesthetics, hardware manipulation, and working with televisions as a medium. One of the first collaborations to come out of this period was jin.formation, made with Shameless Friend (Laine Bergeron), who has since become one of my closest and most enduring collaborators.
In 2017, I was awarded the Momentum Spotlight Artist in Ada, Oklahoma, curated by Sam Dillehay and Bryan Cardinale-Powell. Sam was a genuinely wonderful person to work with and made me feel like what I was doing was worth taking seriously and giving real space to. Before the Momentum exhibition, I had the chance to install the work at Resonator 2.0, when it was still in the warehouse off of Flood. I was given an entire room, which I filled with televisions, a couch, and pink light. The intention was to create a space that felt soothing and intimate, like someone's bedroom, even though pink is typically read as an energizing color. I set up a webcam and live streamed the space for one night only. People came in, sat on the couch, had deeply personal conversations. Someone even took a nap. I chose not to archive the stream out of respect for those moments. If you happened to stumble across it that night, you might have woken up the next morning wondering if it was real.
The video produced to be part of the Pink Hell Installation that traveled around the Oklahoma Metro between 2016 to 2018.
The core of the installation was a 15-minute video loop made up of scenes from my life, rendered in the same looping, glitched-out style as my Tumblr GIFs. It was meant to be open to interpretation. The ethos behind Pink Hell, and this project as a whole, was that I was externalizing my internal landscape: the wonder, the surrealism, the way I actually perceive the world on an everyday basis. It was personal in a way that few projects have been for me.
After Resonator, the work traveled to the Momentum ADA exhibition. The spotlight artists were housed in a separate building from the main show, which gave me feelings at the time, though I understand now they were working with what they had. And honestly, it was worth it. That was the year OVAC somehow got John Waters to be the special guest, which meant we got to have dinner with him. He sat down, looked at me and the other spotlight artist Laur, and the first thing he asked was, "So how are the queers in Oklahoma?" One of us said, "Not good, John." He was funny, warm, and genuinely chill, and meeting him in Ada, Oklahoma, of all places, was extremely surreal.
Pink Hell continued on a little longer after that. I contributed the video loop to Video Bomb, a screening event put on by Lauren Panicelli in the basement of Mackenzie and Co., alongside other video and musical performances. Eventually, I set the project down. The props were thrifted and spray painted, and the paint was starting to chip. Some things are meant to have a natural end. Pink Hell landed in it’s final resting place at Individiual Artists of Oklahoma Gallery for the Kawaii Show 2.0 that was put on by Jenna Bryan. Below is a video following all of these events and my thoughts about it at the time.
Looking back, Pink Hell was a way of life for a stretch of time. It was where I really began to understand what video could do when you push it, stretch it, glitch it, and let it carry something personal. It directly inspired work that came after it. I would not change a single thing about any of the experiences I had while touring this project around.
To put it plainly: Pink Hell began in 2016 as an online blog and grew into an award-recognized installation that traveled across the Oklahoma City metro. If I could do it all again, I would!