Jaimes Mayhew

“Hidden in Plain Site” is a collaboration with Lamont Stanley Bryant, and is a photo series that explores the hyper(in)visibility of LGBTQAI+ people and our intersecting identities by creating and documenting ad-hoc, collaborative camouflaged garments and documenting them with photography.

Featured in artist Sarah G. Sharps Toolbook Project, 2019

“Nonument 01::McKeldin Fountain” is an augmented reality app that allows users to see Baltimore’s now demolished McKeldin Fountain. This project was made in collaboration with Lisa Moren, Neja Tomsic and Martin Bricelj Baraga. Sixteen video interviews with Baltimore residents are included in the app when users tap icons.

Get the app here: App Store / Google Play

Queer Interiors, a year-long installation at the Baltimore Museum of Art, was a collaboration with The LGBT Health Resource Center at Chase Brexton, the BMA and video artist Rahne Alexander. This installation, comprised of an oversize bed, a cabinet featuring community members’ household items, and a participatory video quilt was the site of several community events including legal workshops for transgender people, a ritual led by and for Black LGBTQAI+ people, book discussions and film screenings.

This installation references one of the most contested symbols of queer domestic life: the bedroom, a space of privacy and intimacy within the home. An oversized bed invites visitors to sit, relax, and connect with each other while reflecting on the familiar and unfamiliar aspects of the sculpture. The pattern on the bedspread references the sheet in the iconic photograph Felix Partz, June 5, 1994 by AA Bronson. The oversized pillows feature indentations as though a head could lay there in a nod to Felix Gonzalez Torres’ bed billboards.

“Scream” is a collaborative project with curator Risa Puleo that explores the relationships between queer artists and curators through acts of therapeutic care.

Shot at the ACRE residency in Steuben, WI.

On March 22nd, 2016, from 6:30pm–7:15pm, trans-identified docents followed chat instructions from viewers to cut my clothes away.

Instructions: Use the chat box to send instructions to trans and genderqueer identified docents who will use scissors to cut his clothes away.

Docents: Clyde Man, Asa Keiswetter, Jack Pinder and others.

Produced for Laura McGough’s lecture about the paratextual apparatus of social media as the Critical Studies fellow at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

“The Wave of Mutilation” is a semi–permanent wave off of the coast of Samesies Island. The wave appeared when a group of transmen decided to set sea in search of utopia, and were carried to an area of sea trash that they constructed in the shape of a pregnant seahorse to form Samesies Island. Once believed to be the only means to arrive on Samsies Island, theWave of Mutilation is now understood to be a myth. It is notable that variations of the Samesies myth of The Wave of Mutilation exist across many gender variant communities, This monument stands as a permanentreminder of the reclamation of the very idea of mutilation, and the variety ofways that Samesies can healthily arrive in utopia.

Samesies Island is an imaginary, utopian separatist community for transmasculine-attracted transmasculine folks. Map includes access to healthcare, rural areas without fear of discrimination, public transit and more.

Featured in an article by Risa Puleo published in ArtPapers in Mar/Apr 2015.

Tapestry based on a 1969 photo documenting the diversion of  water from the American falls to enable repairs that prevented erosion. Made in response to research in queer ecology theory.

This work was supported by a Provisions Library Research Residency. Presented at the George Mason School of Art Gallery.

Digital C-Prints, dimensions vary.

These images are the result of using a technique that includes using photo software to auto-stitch images taken out of a window of a moving car near the Hoover Dam. The results are manufactured landscapes made from images that were largely unplanned and spontaneous.  The glitches in color and shape matching, paired with the moving perspective in these images creates disjunctions where towers float away in the sky, beautifully engineered structures stop and start at random in the desert landscape, and new logics of visual ecology are formed.

Editions of 25 for each image available.

Relations is a series of animated GIFs that explore the human-as-consumer relationship to the land-as-consumed.

Inspired by my experience as a transgender person from a family of geologists and ecologists, Ways To Change The Body/Land is a series of instruction works that describe ways that  a body or landscape (a body/land) is changed in social, political, cultural, physical or ecological contexts.  These instructions are abstract, and relate to the assigning of identity and use-value, inciting a call to action but not assigning the power that is needed to follow through. This leaves room for questions- if one wanted to change a body/land by assessing value, what kind of value should be assessed? Would taking out a life insurance policy assess value? Would estimating available resources assess value? All of these works seek to acknowledge the constant flux of a body/land in a perpetual state of becoming. Although I do not believe that landscapes and bodies are qualitatively the same, I believe that we assign meaning to both in similar ways.

Ongoing instructions for changing a body/land are posted on Twitterand Facebook.

Exhibited at City Arts (Baltimore), Hoffmansgaleri (Reykjavik), Goucher College Gallery (Towson, MD). Published in Undercurrents: Journal of Critical Ecology vol 19 from York University Press.

Energy Awareness Month was an exhibition organized by Jaimes Mayhew and the  Autonomous Energy Research Lab, presented at Gallery CA in Baltimore, MD. explored electricity and our relationship with the production, consumption, and creative inspiration that can be drawn from it. Organized in four chapters, the artists included were Jaimes Mayhew, Steve Bradley, Marian April Glebes, Tim Nohe and Services United. The exhibition ran from October 6–28, 2012.

A mobile research lab was transported to several events in Iceland as a way to collect stories about electricity production. These events ranged from art openings, to parties and poetry readings. I collaborated with people on many of the events, and used stored bike power from a car battery to run many of the events.

This project was supported by a Fulbright fellowship. To read about my travels in Iceland, you can check out the blog I kept here.

Two plaques were made, one for Chrissy Pollis, and one for Dean Spade for a gorilla art show in the bathrooms at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This is in collaboration with The Institute for Infinitely Small Things.

These plaques are in the permanent collection at the MFA.

Art projects fail a lot, particularly those that are participatory, public and/or social. They fail for different reasons and cause myriad revelations. Nevertheless, the structures that we use to talk about these works and contexts where they are presented often don’t leave room for discussing the failures plainly and objectively.

We’re interested in failure– in its relationship to creative production, artistic rhetoric and public presentation. We’re also interested in making work that does not fail as often by sharing our failures, and hearing yours through our Failure Archive and our Support Groups.

The Failure Support Group project is run by members of The Institute For Infinitely Small Things. This project is inspired by a Failure Support Group event produced by Platform2 in Boston in 2008.

To get more information,  browse/contribute to the archive of failure, inquire about hosting a Failure Support Group and more, visit www.thefailuresupportgroup.com OR www.thefailuresupportgoup.com

This piece was performed on April 30, 2010 as a part of Hell, No!, curated by David Louis Fierman and RJ Supa at the Convent of St. Cecilia in Brooklyn, NY.  Visitors to the convent were greeted at the entryway to the chapel by a docent who gave them a card with the following text: Cut Piece With Transgender Body (dedicated to Yoko Ono): Please use the scissors at the altar to cut his clothes away.

Accumulation/Temporary Occupations is a gallery installation and an organized series of events taking place from April 8-24, 2010 at University of Maryland, Baltimore County for my MFA Thesis Exhibition. In the gallery, stationary bikes were used to produce electrical power in the gallery that both illuminates a marquee sign and charges a battery. The battery, as an accumulation of power, was used to provide energy for a series of public, outdoor events that took place in the immediate area of the CADVC, and were organized by artists that I invited to be a part of the show.

A Drill For Reimagining Wall Street was a participatory drill at Conflux City that sought to reimagine the best-case scenario for Wall street both as a concept and a physical space, and to temporarily intervene with the tourist activity in the area.

This project is also featured on this website.

Special thanks to Shannon Allen, Liz Knafo and Liz Hodgson.

If art is valued for the quantity/quality of energy spent on the creation of the work, then how do we value the human-cultivated energy that goes into the value of the gallery patron’s experience? “Sold” is an investigation of electricity’s role as a service, and the gallery as the service provider in the gallery environment. Through site-specific research, Services United has highlighted 6 site specific works that contribute to Gallery Four’s functioning as a purveyer of energy, as a seller of energy that people would like in their homes, and the history of energy.

The rhetoric in our current culture of fear reminds us that we must constantly be preparing ourselves for the next big disaster. services united is interested in investigating the language used around emergency preparedness to produce a different kind of emergency preparedness. What’s the emergency? Our food system is dependent on fossil fuels, people do not have access to organic, healthy and wholesome affordable foods in many neighborhoods in Baltimore, and throughout the United States due to geographic location or monetary reasons.

Seed Bombs: Services United Seed Bombs packs consist of 3 seed bombs with sweet clover, black-eyed susans and thyme seeds with a self-addressed post card to map where the bombs have been launched.

Emergency Preparedness Gardens: Each emergency preparedness garden kit contains enough organic seeds to grow food in a 100 sq. foot area.

Preparing cultivation/cultivating preparation was featured at the 2008 Baltimore Bioneers conference (curated by Peter Brun) and the University of Maryland Baltimore County Teach-In On Sustainability.

Things That Have (Probably) Never Been Done Before was an experiment and open invitation to create new behaviors for the gallery space at Delaware County Community College.
In an attempt to intervene with social behaviors in a gallery environment, participants were asked to create and document everyday micro-actions that they believed had not happened in the space before using index cards, a set of wireless surveillance cameras and recording device.

Whether or not these actions had or had not occurred in this place is inconsequential- there is no way to prove or disprove the occurrence of these everyday actions previous to their documentation. Micro-actions that were submitted range from “No one has daydreamed here before” and “No one has looked to the future here before” to “No one has picked a wedgie here before”. What I find most interesting about these micro-actions is the wide range of personalities that are evident in each action. Some actions are only documented by the index card that was left behind, while others are documented on video as well. Some have a slapstick humor sensibility, while others are more contemplative. Some are everyday actions, some are not. To me, all of these actions reflect against my own expectations of what I (and I imagine most people) expect of typical gallery behavior: people may daydream, but only when viewing art work, people pick wedgies, do handstands or “crazy dance”.
Taking inspiration from Erving Goffman’s ideas about everyday life, I believe that for every space, whether public or private, we share a different set of coded behaviors that for the most part, is shared among the people that are in the space.

Presented at Articulture at Delaware County Community College.

From July of 2008, to July of 2009, Shannon Young and Jaimes Mayhew recorded responses from people in Baltimore to four questions that were displayed in various neighborhoods in public spaces. An archive of the phone calls that we received is below.

What’s after capitalism? 
[audio:http://www.enginesofthefuture.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/1-capitalism.mp3]

What is terror?
[audio:http://www.enginesofthefuture.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/4-terror.mp3]

Why do we sing, anyway?
[audio:http://www.enginesofthefuture.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/3-sing.mp3]

When are you the most afraid, and why?
[audio:http://www.enginesofthefuture.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/2-fear.mp3]

For the project Free Service, services united offered a free service through ads on craigslist and word of mouth. services united was interested in investigating the role of the exchange of money in performing services. Free services performed included painting a kitchen floor for an artist collective, mulching a yard for a neighbor, and helping to paint a Montessori school. Our attempts at providing free services  proved to create suspicion for those to whom we offered or provided services.

A Corporate Command is an instruction work, a call to action in the form of an imperative: “Just Do It”, “Turn on the Future”, “Live without Limits”, “Tap into great taste”, “Think different”, “Ride the light”.

It is the hypothesis of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things that these commands, largely and consciously ignored by a public over-saturated with advertisements, function very effectively as infinitely small things.

By compiling, tabulating, concretizing and enacting these commands in the International Database of Corporate Commands, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things seeks to better understand the mechanisms behind this deployment of power and its larger cultural ramifications.

The Institute for Infinitely Small Things uses these commands to conduct research performances- performances in which we attempt to enact, as literally as possible, what the command tells us to do and where it tells us to do it.

Project website: www.corporatecommands.com

Things That Might Have Happened is an exploration of the past, present and future of the Chelsea Piers, specifically Segment 4, from Horatio Street to Clarkson Street, including the highly contested Pier 45, or the Christopher Street Pier. As part of the Conflux Festival exploring psychogeography in New York City, Richard James Supa Jr. and James Mayhew chose to explore the uses of the pier, both past and present, and how people feel about the changes being made and what, if any changes should come to the area. Things That Might Have Happened is a self-guided audio and visual tour allowing each participant to delve into various possibilities, suggestions, ideas and thoughts on the future of the piers. The viewer participant is even asked to suggest their own ideas as to what they believe are necessary for their enjoyment of the public space. Over 20 new proposals were made for the area and were hand drawn on transparency paper with a corresponding photo beneath the drawing to act as a map to different areas in and around the pier. Things That Might Have Happened hopes to become on ongoing discussion through the internet with space available for posts and blogging.

History
The piers near the West Village have had a great significance in the history of the GLBTTSQQ community. From the boom of the Gay Liberation movement in the late sixties to the renovation of the pier in the mid-nineties, to now, this space has always been a place that has been used primarily by certain sectors of GLBTTSQQ people. In more recent years, the pier and the immediate area around it have become a contested space, pitting the people who hang out at it and the people who live near it against each other. TTMHH will provide a tour of things that may have happened with this space, and will make proposals for use of the piers at present through a historical perspective. Through images that are juxtaposed over the space at the speculation on what could have happened at the Christopher Street Piers from the angle of the various groups that have affected the history and use of this space. Who controls, or gains control of public space? How have the piers changed? Why? And When?

The Institute was commissioned to do a work for a public video screen in Harvard Square, in Cambridge, MA. The resulting work is a video guidebook for tourists in Harvard Square which instructs them in 57 things they can do for fun, leisure and entertainment without spending any money.

To watch the video, visit the project website.