haute meals (2022-present) is a big, gay umbrella of social projects nourishing solidarity for reproductive freedom, including Mutual Menstruation (a community production endeavor, sewing menstrual gear for all genders), breadbox (promoting access to the highest quality of abortion care through art, breaking bread, and peer-to-peer education), and gay af pizza: sexy talks for hungry people (queer sexual education via intimate meals). These projects merge and diverge as social conditions require. Reach out to get involved in any of these efforts!

Kinfabula (2022) is a queer little play set in a surreal domestic space from the near-future and not-so-distant past; Kinfabula is a flamboyant, site-responsive installation in which gallery guests are invited to perform their imagination, care, and criticality using scripts that have been only partially written. How might queer kinship be a liberatory myth towards co-structuring the futures we want? How might it not? (James Watrous Gallery, Madison, WI.)

Index (2011 - present) is a collection of conversational encounters documented using instant film and a few words; this long-term project explores the mechanics of intimacy, the feelings imbued in time, and the relationship between artifacts and recollection. Borealis and co-conspirators have talked abortion, mothers, and heartbreak; they’ve been scolded by other guests in tea shops (fuck those people), spent time in your bed (above the covers but who’s keeping track), and teetered on some very precarious places (never again, but thank you for the opportunity). 

Toast (2016) is an immersive installation that combines multi-channel audiovisuals, projection mapping, found furniture, and personal artifacts in a gallery space arranged as a domestic interior. Community members were invited into the gallery (Arts + Literature Laboratory) prior to the exhibition to record scripted memories of gender-based discrimination. Off camera, the evening was an opportunity to strengthen queer community as prompted by the script and by participants’ myriad lived experience. Recordings later played while the artist took up residence in the gallery, offering tea and conversation to guests. Production support and collaboration by Midwest Story Lab.

Season of Shadows (2017-2020) is a social project in which Borealis interviewed trans and queer peers about gender and intersecting experiences, working through conversation to conjure metaphors for those parts of ourselves that can feel difficult to explain otherwise. Subsequent community collaborations have reiterated or contradicted interview themes through performances, installations, parties, and exhibitions. Season of Shadows (In Real Life), included a live speech-to-text projection of performative conversations; meanwhile, participants considered which feelings among trans and non-binary people are not easily translated for public consumption. This project received a BLINK temporary art award from Madison Arts Commission.

DARK STUDIO (2019) celebrated radical play. Borealis transformed an apartment into a series of immersive installations including video performance, light projections, altars, drag, personal nightmares, conspicuously planted props, and a live, closed-circuit video surveillance system streaming between rooms of the home-studio. DARK STUDIO was the last great party.