Book launch: Intimate confession is a project
Book launch: Intimate confession is a project, with curator Jennifer Teets With Anna Mayer, Michael Snediker, and Roberto Tejada
Supported by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts
Date:
Tuesday, April 29 , 2025 | 6:30pm-8:30pm
Format:
Intimate Confession Is a Project is a project that explores the intersection between intimacy and infrastructure with a particular focus on the social landscape of Houston, where the corresponding exhibition took place. The 10 featured artists use multimedia works to think through infrastructure as an intimate holding cell, capable of great emotional power. Intended as a scholarly contribution to cross-disciplinary exchange between the visual arts and the humanities, the book includes essays by Ara Wilson, Kai Bosworth and Lara Mimosa Montes, as well as poetry by Juliana Sphar and Roberto Tejada.
Jennifer Teets is a Houston, Texas born curator, writer, and occasional performer based in Paris since 2009. Working at the intersection of the poetics of science and technology, material culture, literature, and performance, within her work, she addresses the roles of consumption and contamination as an embodiment of thought which then performs, spores, proliferates. Teets holds a double BA from the University of Texas at Austin in Latin American Studies and Cultural Geography (2001) and an MA in Experimentation in Arts and Politics from Institut d’études politiques de Paris (2014). Teets studied under the late sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour across 2013-2014 at Sciences Po. She is currently guest tutor and curator of Offspring 2024: Underbelly at De Ateliers, Amsterdam with a forthcoming publication published by De Ateliers and designed by Joris Kritis.
Anna Mayer uses ceramics—dirt that becomes stone-like once heated—to respond to colonial legacies within land use, archaeology, and 1960s-70s Land Art. Through ceramics projects that enact various kinds of burial and recovery, she points to extractive and exploitative human behaviors towards the land. Mayer’s various materials include human-made artifacts, soft and hard sediments, and complex psychological states. With these she explores various ways to access and imagine what is unacknowledged. Solo exhibitions include the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2021) and the Jung Center (Houston, 2022), as well as A-B Projects, AWHRHWAR, and Adjunct Positions, all in Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include Artpace (TX), Moody Center for the Arts (TX), Blaffer Art Museum (TX), Ballroom Marfa (TX), California Museum of Photography, Glasgow International (UK), and Catherine Bastide Gallery (BE). She is a 2023-24 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. Mayer was Assistant Director of the LA-based Institute For Figuring from 2009 – 2018. Currently she is Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of Houston.
Michael Snediker is the author of two books of poems, The New York Editions (Fordham University Press 2017, winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize) and The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (Punctum Books 2014, Lambda finalist for Best Gay Poetry). He’s also the author of Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain & Queer Embodiment (U.Minnesota Press, 2021) and Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & Other Felicitous Persuasions (U.Minnesota Press, 2009). A recipient of multiple residencies at Yaddo and the James Merrill House, he is Professor of American Literature & Poetics at the University of Houston.
Roberto Tejada is the author of poetry collections that include Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), and Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006). A translator, editor, essayist, art historian, and cultural critic Tejada’s writing addresses the political imagination and impurity of time in shared image environments; configurations of art, life, and language inclined to the future. Committed to poetics and open sites of cultural inquiry—regional, transnational, and diasporic—Tejada’s research and creative interests involve the language arts and image worlds of Latin America, especially Mexico, Brazil, the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, and other sites of U.S. Latinx cultural production. He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston where he teaches Creative Writing and Art History.
Watch a video of the Intimate confession is a project Intimacy/Infrastructure panel
Location:
Basket Books, Basket Books & Art
115 Hyde Park Blvd