THE CHIMERICAL: AN INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING PRACTICE motivated by the desire for material gathering and eggshell paper books. A collection of conversations that deserve resting places
MATERIAL TRACES: A 90-Day Somatic Journal. Three months of creative prompts grounded in sensation, memory, and embodied attention. Each day offers a passage into noticing—through texture, sound, color, breath, and the subtle movements between body and imagination. Not prescriptive. Not productivity-focused. A space for consistency without rigidity, where creativity is understood as inseparable from the rhythms of presence and care. Designed for artists, writers, feelers, and anyone seeking a practice of attention that honors both discipline and play.
Material Traces is a tool for ritual for those who seek presence. It is a space for creatives, feelers, and anyone drawn to the subtle intersections of body, soil, thought, and imagination.This practice understands creativity as inseparable from the rhythms of breath, sensation, and awe. Just as the body carries memory and emotion, the marks we make through language, image, or gesture carry traces of what might otherwise remain unexplored. Each prompt is a passage, an opening into meditation, healing, and creation.
Material Traces
MANHATTAN PENIS DRAWINGS: A responsive zine. When I first saw Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks, I felt delighted. Hundreds of penises—simple, declarative, unashamed. Penises in repetition, in motion, in public. It felt like a kind of openness. A break in the usual rules of propriety and erasure. But the longer I looked, the more I noticed what wasn’t there. The drawings felt uniform. Confident. Phallic. They leaned on the aesthetics of erection—bold lines, upright forms, closed circuits. What was missing was softness. Necessary Queernesses. Racial variation. The leak, the fold, the blur. The possibility of a penis unPhallicized.
The “kingdom of penises,” as Hyperallergic put it (https://hyperallergic.com/304132/keith-haring-envisions-manhattan-as-a-kingdom-of-penises/), felt less like a field of play and more like a coronation—one that repeated the same kind of body, the same kind of gaze.
So I draw my own.
Not as rejection, but as redirection. My Brooklyn Penis Drawings take up the form as a question, not a statement. They are interrupted, flaccid, asymmetrical. These drawings are not meant to assert but to unfix—to move the penis away from symbolic certainty and toward something slower, quieter, more unstable.
Manhattan Penis Drawings
KITCHEN TABLE SERIES Inspired by the lingering moments post-meal and the robust conversations shared with friends at the table, this series gathers thoughtful individuals in dialogue around, albeit meandering, topics. The Kitchen Table Series - seeks to replicate the casual but critical dialogues that emerge in a comfortable setting around food and drink. Here, topical discourse spills over into the creation of art, thought, and movement – and their many somatic entanglements. The conversations are recorded, but shy away from presentation and interview formats. Fred Moten has pointed to the table table as a locus of mind wandering and ruptures—a platform for ideas aired, dismantled, and reshaped. He reflects on how the table sometimes evolves, from a physical assembly to a digital forum. While we navigate these dual spaces, our focus prioritizes the tactile, where material engagement creates this exchange.
Pieces of these critical conversations, with the permission of participants*, will be shared so as to contribute to our mutating, somatic, collective body.