Hold My Hand Please
2025
Performance
Do anything you want or just hold my hand.
I often make work that responds directly to a particular place or moment. The spring open studio offered a chance for me to experiment with something I often do when I’m alone in the studio: lying on the floor, quietly extending my hand beyond the curtain, and waiting. What happens when a hand — empty and offered — becomes an interlocutor? What might it mean to ask for things out loud, publicly, and with a simple gesture?
To amplify the gesture, I printed dozens of posters and pinned them outside the studio. Each poster listed desires both mundane and impossible — “I want an exhibition,” “I want work,” “I want money,” “I want 1Q84,” “I want a green card.” As a fallback, I wrote: “If you can’t give me these, give me anything. If you can’t give me anything, give me a hand. Just hold my hand.” The posters were both confessional and performative: they named wants while inviting others to answer them through small acts.
During the performance the responses were unpredictable and intimate. Some people mistook the hand for an artificial prop and recoiled in surprise; others read the posters and laughed or offered comments — “I hope I can give you a green card.” People left small offerings: coins, cigarettes, a half-drunk beer, a ripe strawberry. Some nearly stepped on my extended hand, some peered behind the curtain, and some gripped my palm for a very long time. One visitor even picked up a blank poster and wrote the word democracy across it, turning the act of response into its own declaration.
There’s a quiet regret that I couldn’t meet everyone face to face. But the hand itself functioned as a mediator — a site for exchange, for humor, for awkwardness and tenderness. Whether you left something for me or held my hand, that too became a kind of ritual of encounter.
