haute meals at motherhouse (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 (sexual education via intimate meals).
breadbox (2022-present) promotes access to high quality abortion care through peer to peer education and art.
rest stop (2023, 2024) is an immersive installation including video projections, care planning zines, and cozy vibes, where queers congregate and rest. Rest stop iterations served as quiet rooms at Lexington Pride Festival in 2023 and 2024.
mega drifts of love and affection (2024) is an altar for our collective queer futures; queers and our comrades write letters on the back of scanned photographs, folding them up like a love letter before placing it in the softness of the altar, to be held indefinitely. Guests who write letters and contribute them to the altar may choose to take a peer’s letter from the altar, keeping in their care the uncertainties, visions, and sweetness contained within it. (Bolivar Art Gallery, Lexington, KY.)
these posters are a drag (2024)
Toast (2016) is an installation combining multi-channel audiovisuals, projection mapping, and personal artifacts in a gallery arranged as a domestic interior. Community members were invited into the gallery prior to the exhibition to record scripted memories of gender-based discrimination. Off camera, the evening was an opportunity to strengthen queer community. Production support and collaboration by Midwest Story Lab. (Arts + Literature Laboratory, Madison, WI.)
Kinfabula (2022) is a queer little play set in a surreal domestic space from the near-future and not-so-distant past; 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.)
Season of Shadows (2017-2020) is a social project in which Borealis interviewed trans and queer peers about gender and intersecting experiences, conjuring 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) was the last great party. Borealis transformed an apartment into a series of immersive installations including video performance, light projections, altars, personal nightmares, conspicuously planted props, and a live, closed-circuit video surveillance system.
pray for me (2024) mixed media study for soft sculpture
Index (2011 - present) is a growing collection of conversations documented using instant film and a few words.
borealis is an artist, organizer, and full spectrum careworker. They are a member of Solarpunk Surf Club, a friend of the breadbox project, and a worker-cooperator at artfarm—a forthcoming artist-run commons with the democratic spirit of a free school. Beau lives and works in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Beau received a Bachelor of Science in Art and undergraduate certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012; they went on to receive a Master of Science in Educational Leadership and Policy from Portland State University with a graduate emphasis in community-based learning in 2014. They taught Art + Social Justice and Service-Learning in Art as a lecturer at University of Wisconsin-Madison; they also taught at Preschool of the Arts and Monroe Street Arts Center before co-founding ArtWrite Collective, which merged with Arts + Literature Laboratory in 2018. Borealis served as the Education & Outreach Director at Arts + Literature Laboratory until mid-2021, which they viewed as an extension of their social practice and an outlet to advocate for peer artists. Beau is continuing their education and growing their network of collaborators through an MFA program at University of Kentucky, and through multiple community-based carework training programs. They volunteer with Exhale Pro-Voice and Kentucky Health Justice Network. Beau remains in solidarity with peers who face the life-altering debt imposed by imperialist forms of credentialism, and is committed to leveraging their resources for the common good.
mxborealis [at] gmail [dot] com
