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Jessica Fairfax Hirst
Palmer Fishman Studios

(Dominican Republic/USA) 

“All the Times…  

Todos los Tiempos…. 

die ganze Zeit…. 

IMMER (always, still –)” 

This is a laboratory
This is a process, not a finished product
This is an accumulation

a la Trisha Brown

This is geological time 
Climate time 
Water time 
Evolution, biology, ecology 
Cycles 
Human history, with all of the beauty and all of the bloodshed 
indigenous time – “ the future is ancestral” 
Colonial and imperial time 
War time and peace time and 
everything in between 
Cultural time –  
Individual and collective stories 
Intersections, connections, overlapping 
Layers upon layers 
There can be slow, seemingly linear development, plus 
Heat, 
Time,  
Pressure and 
Cataclysms that cause sudden 
Ruptures, 
Tipping points, 
From which it can be hard or impossible to recover 
 
Forcing new directions 
 
It is never finished 
 
It asks you to interact, to contribute, to participate 
 
 This is a real time portrait-in-motion  of 
 a disabled mind 
 and body 
 
This is a window into a process that has been affected by all of earth’s history

PLUS

40 years of psychiatric medication 

and now the nervous system contortions, and damage that comes from my brain trying to recover as I veerrrryy slllooowwwwwlllllllyyy  

reduce 

The dosages of toxic lithium and other neurochemicals  

that have been destroying  

my kidneys  

and my thyroid 

 and my memory 

And my immune system 

And most of my senses 

Made me too extreme – now in withdrawal, and neurochemical overload, I 

Cry too easily 

Scream too easily 

Break down too easily 

Explode too easily 

Have to run away,  

take refuge,  

can’t handle normal interpersonal interactions, or  

stress without  

reacting in ways that some consider  

not socially acceptable. 

Losing important relationships 

 

Plus +  

Menopause 

 

 

 

There’s part of the human mind that wants order, that wants to find  

a linear path 

It makes it easier for us to understand things 

It makes it easier for us to coordinate, to manage 

It also makes it easier for people to control 

Us 

 

But many things in the universe do not have only one form 

Matter is both a 

 wave  

and 

 a particle 

Try to wrap your head around that! 

 

And time can seem linear within certain frames and durations  

but it’s also spiral,  

🌀  

elastic,  

expanding, 

And one day could even go  

in 🔄 Reverse …Recycle⏮️  

Ways to interact with the installation: 
  • Draw a picture, or create a portrait in space, or write something down with the available materials.   
  • Feel free to add additional timelines, or hang your contribution on an existing timeline.
  • Draw a portrait of how time feels for you.  Hang it on one of the timelines. 
  • working with another person, stretch out some ribbons into different different kinds of time, how you visualize that time, and how you actually experience it. 
     
    Cultural  time
    – draw a picture, or create a portrait in space, or write something down with the available materials – how is visualized in your culture? In your family? When you interact with people from different cultures, do you notice differences in how they visualize, manage, or experience time?  How does this affect how you get along with each other? How might understanding how they visualize or manage time help you manage things better together? 
     
    Ecological, climate, water, environmental time:  what do you notice in your local environment about cycles, linear, progressions, development, ruptures, changes?   
     
    You can use the materials to create physical connections between different timelines, and different geographies.  How does your life and activities here in Germany Connect to or impact other places and times? 
     
    Personal development, life, cycles, birth, puberty, reproduction, adulthood, aging, hormonal time, health time, gender time – draw, write down, or create in space images from milestones or experiences in any of these areas.  
    How is your personal story connected to collective stories, to environmental stories, to political and human history? You can use the ribbons to literally illustrate these connections in space. 

I make performances, videos, installations and texts, sometimes all in the same project.   I create metaphoric crumple zones, the parts of a car’s body designed to absorb the massive energy caused by the impact of a crash. Like the engineering of a crumple zone, my works seek to create a space to observe controlled deformation, rather than merely succumb to chaotic destruction. They explore ways to redirect and absorb the forces that threaten to crush us.  

Full Artist statement

My work lives in the spaces between the world and me, around themes including mental illness and disability, capitalist realism, failures of binary thinking, gender and the climate crisis.  I consider myself a refugee of sorts from the country where I was born and grew up, the United States. Why? because none of my supposedly top-notch psychiatrists or. therapists ever mentioned that my home country’s culture, political and economic infrastructure might have something to do with my serious mental and physical illness, until I went to live somewhere else. I discovered by chance that I was much healthier living in Nicaragua, Spain and the Dominican Republic, and that whenever I tried to move back to the US I become dangerously sick again. My career began in climate change policy in the Clinton-Gore Administration, and I also worked in counseling and dance, all of which filters into my art practice. My struggles and my privilege both inform my artwork – my disabilities are in spite of my privileged access to resources, education, opportunity, and the “best” mental healthcare. While I agree wholeheartedly that the US must defund the police and invest in mental healthcare, I strenuously question the current profit-based, meds-focused system. We need a much bigger basket of supported options. My disabilities have been a profound determinant of how/when/where/whether I can work or study at all; for example, while I graduated Phi Beta Kappa in Earth Systems from Stanford in 1993, I was unable to complete three different Master’s Degree programs in three different decades, in Resources and Energy (UC Berkeley, 1990s), Clinical Community Counseling (Johns Hopkins, early 2000s), and Fine Art (Otis College of Art and Design, 2016-17) due to health complications and institutional ableism. I have not been able to hold a “normal” full-time ableist job since 1995.  
 

Beyond the Binaries

Excerpt

“Beyond the Binaries” is a 32-minute video-lecture-story, illustrated with visual material created, sampled, and remixed from my own performance and visual art.  

I start from Paul B. Preciado’s declaration that the transversal thread connecting the roots of the climate crisis, racism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, and colonialism, is the binary thought that forms the basis of the structures of the sciences and heteronormative-patriarchal societies. 

I build my argument with episodes from my own studies in the environment, psychology, contemporary art, working in the Clinton-Gore Administration on the politics of climate change, multiple mental health crises, disability, and scientists I have met. I add lessons learned from my multiple mental and physical health crises, continuously morphing disabilities, and observations of women and gender nonconforming scientists I have met who dared to approach environmental science in new ways.  

 I cite Theo Coburn’s discoveries of how common household products disrupt hormones and reproduction, and I reflect on my ecology professor Joan Roughgarden, who transitioned gender years after I graduated, and subsequently revisited how much ecology had missed or gotten wrong about sex and gender in the natural world due to culture-bound blinders that originated with Darwin. I fold in Mark Fisher’s and Johanna Hedva’s pioneering work on how toxic cultural, political environments contribute to chronic illness. 

I include visual material from performances in Puerto Plata, Quito, Riga, Los Angeles, Almeria, New York, Santo Domingo, Jordan, Israel, Nicaragua, Mexico City, Bankgok, and more, as well as graphic illustrations, and paintings.  

„Beyond the Binaries“ had its premiere in December 2020 at the Placa Reial in Barcelona, as an official part of @drapart_org, International Festival of Sustainable Art of Catalonia, and was presented again at the 2021 Drap Art, this time at a daylong symposium at the Museum of the History of Barcelona, organized by the Art Department of the University of Barcelona. It has since been screened at festivals, galleries and events in cities including Riga, Philadelphia, Hudson Valley NY, Bogota, Puerto Plata, Cabarete, Kassel, Berlin, Malaga and Washington DC. 

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