SER SERPAS

JOHN BELKNAP

Thesis: Of monsters but without men.

Ser Serpas’s Potentials

John Belknap
December 2021, mid-pandemic

Across Ser Serpas’s navy sweatshirt read one of the most exhausted endorsements of
American postmodernism to date: ‘I <3 NY.’ Serpas had appeared mere moments ago at a
model’s birthday located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was almost midnight. We hugged.
As we disentangled our many limbs from the embrace, I noticed an outline of Lady Liberty inside
her sweatshirt’s swollen ‘<3’. I grinned, “To be lost to the fabric of New York.” She returned my
grin with a half-smile and replied, “Sooner or later everyone ends up a little lost on this island.”

With both hands now free, Serpas rolled up her sleeves and searched for a cigarette. Her truism
was emblematic evidence, I thought, that any pedestrian could end up alone on Manhattan
Island feeling lost to the world. Even Lady Liberty, herself a rather luminous pedestrian, has
more or less been forgotten on tiny Ellis Island. Meanwhile, traces of the statue’s miserable
predicament continue to circulate in the form of discount store souvenirs or graphics designer
sweatshirts. Serpas laughed when I suggested this to her. “Correction,” she said, “Sooner or
later everyone ends up a little lost on this island, visibly wearing their heart on their sleeve,”
pointing to the fabled light bearer on her garment. With a flick of her wrist, she ignited a
fluorescent lighter then set fire to the remaining cigarette from her pack. “That’s just American
apparel.”

Ser Serpas -- artist, poet, model, community organizer, collaborator, curator, and, for the time
being, expat -- is not our Lady Liberty incarnate. She is inclined to drift. Sometimes the artist
finds potential in physical objects. These objects are typically trash she encounters on the street
or discarded debris she collects from friends and neighbors. After she sorts through her debris,
she sticks, stacks, tucks, ties, weaves, balances, and bonds the discarded objects together for
gallery or museum exhibition. pay to cum (what i thought), 2017, shown at Queer Thoughts in
New York, was made in a state of rapid repair. cum included worn leather, decayed berries, and
weathered textiles woven through a plaster headboard and installed sideways onto a gallery
wall. The artwork, with its inscrutable mess of veins, muscles, skins, and boudoir contraband,
resembled a fin de siècle awning broadcasting a libertine’s wildest dreams.

At other times, potential finds the artist. While studying Visual Arts at Columbia University in
2017, the artist’s professors and classmates had recommendations pertaining to her senior
thesis. They suggested she include biographical narrative to contextualize her work. This was
disheartening. During her time at Columbia, representational painting and personal essays had,
with much exhaustion, consumed her peers. These styles of self-expression suffered from a
lack of profundity and an excess of imitation. Ultimately, her professors and classmates urged
her to cave in to trends. The artist responded in written form.

“I was sure they wanted me to make blank work, or rather to just identify my work as blank work
which they sometimes think is equally as good, and I was not having any of that. Enough blank
artists were doing blank work.”

Serpas was uninterested in trends and rejected conforming to blank work.

Two years later, the artist’s defiance materialized into an exhibition. Titled “what we need is
another body,” held at Truth and Consequences in Geneva, Serpas assembled nine sculptures
of discarded objects, including the stub of an artificial, eggshell-colored Christmas tree, tree of
life, 2017, and a cinched taupe belt bedazzled with red plastic ties, twine, and a sleeping mask,
migration, 2017. Each sculpture stood underneath a plastic shopping bag, suggestive of dollar
store pedestals. The space was illuminated by spotlights and was intentionally left dark from
flattened FedEx boxes that covered the gallery’s windows. Sprawled across the interior
cardboard-premises and walls were nine handwritten poems. Through the dim light, I could
barely make out the words, “TREE OF LIFE.” Did her poems index her sculptures, or, perhaps,
was it the sculptures that indexed the poems? It’s hard to say as it was hard to see. Here was
proof that our desire to see one another clearly, even ourselves, is often just out of reach,
unstable, and, at its lousiest, unbearable.

The artist and poet, however, strays from naming her practice as one that obfuscates. Her
exhibitions are full of discarded objects-as-artworks, or what she calls “potentials.” The
“potentials” resist prescriptive taxonomy cast upon them by way of a viewer’s lazy projections.
One might ask any of the following upon seeing her artworks: is it assemblage? Is it a scatter
piece? Is it institutional critique? It is unknowable. “The negation is all the more stunning in its
nihilism,” writes artist Hannah Black in the introduction to Serpas’s book of poetry, Carman,
2018, “because it is ambivalent and hungry.” The artwork’s refusal to be defined as refuse by
the viewer is both “its nihilism” and its “potential” asserting itself in-real-time. Thus, the artist’s
“potentials” come alive by its right to refusal. The artworks take on a pseudo-subjectivity and
begin to have a little life of their very own.

For through the loop and the belt, 2019, two dusty closets were stacked atop one another while
contents like automobile parts, stones, pipes, and shattered glass spool out onto dirt-trodden
ground. Serpas goes so far to wink at the “potential” narrative of negation in through the loop
and the belt as this “potential” bears the explicit mark of the unliving. The artwork calls to mind

two or three giants wrapped in starch whites with outstretched arms mourning two mounds of
muddy earth presumed to be freshly buried bodies. Yet, a divine providence relieved the artist’s
afflicted grievers. While the artwork happens to mimic the scene of death itself, its title suggests
the opposite. through the loop and the belt advertises a secured state of repetition, a motion that
both loops and fastens, a cycle of life and death. Put simply, rebirth. Does through the loop and
the belt’s nod to rebirth mark a return to an origin? Or, is it a return of something repressed?
Does it even matter? At the close of an exhibition, the artist’s “potentials” are deaccessioned
and returned to the neighborhood in which they were previously taken. Back to Paradise they
go.

Growing up in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, Serpas shared a bedroom with her mother until she
graduated from high school. The artist recalls hoarding a small pile of trash-as-treasure under
her bed in order to abide by her mother’s insistence for order in their bedroom. Her mother
worked in the property division of the Los Angeles Police Department and was tasked with
cataloging debris from various crimes. The confiscated items were taken in by the state and,
eventually, filed as evidence before a court of law. The artist took notes from her mother’s
profession and learned early on that anything human owned is bound for another life given the
right (or wrong) set of circumstances. Like atrophies for participation, 2021, displayed at Galerie
Balice Hertling in Paris. The wooden roller coaster-like work comprises two vertical wood pallets
leaning against one another at a 45 degree angle with two slotted wood panels hanging down
from the crest of the artwork to form a lattice. A four-legged chair parked atop the diagonal pallet
faces the floor. Given these circumstances, the artwork functions as a ride-for-one hurtling its
lonely participant straight towards another life in hell.

Recently, the artist has adopted another modernist practice: painting photographs. The
paintings, made in sets of 18 and rendered on plywood, reproduce footage of Serpas in pre-
and post-coital montage. Each painting depicts a cropped, close-up Serpas-like double that
poses and flexes for a hungry, blurry-eyed voyeur. The paintings are worked over in a creamy,
low-Resolution palette. Sometimes, the artist’s double encounters a companion. In one painting
(all Untitled), a hand attached to a stubby arm pulls down burgundy underwear revealing rosy
shadows, and, in another painting, a fist punches knuckles-first into doughy bed sheets as a
lover grips at their wrist.

The carnal scenes scenes are a rather obvious nod to early 2000’s celebrity sex tapes that
cropped up on the internet during Serpas’s adolescence. The “leaked” sex tapes of Paris Hilton
or Kim Kardashian captured restless ingenues in heat, much like Serpas’s paintings, and forever
immortalized these ingenues as self-canonized dieties of online romance. Unlike all that online
smut, Serpas tells me her paintings “have few identifying markers on the body.” No tattooed
twinks, rugged daddies, or blonde bombshells to view here. The artist’s thick application of
pigment onto plywood melts away hard lines and flattens her busy figures. By painting towards
abstraction, as opposed to representation, she cultivates an atmosphere of anonymity. Here,
Serpas provides proof again, through the vehicle of abstraction, that desire is often illegible.

Approximately two months later was the night we met up in New York. We shared her last
remaining cigarette. When the smoke ran out, she dropped the nub and stomped out its
embers. She looked around and divulged, “My sights are on Paris next.” I wonder what trash
she’ll find there.