Title: "Thank you for babysitting." Artist: Brit Valdez. Medium: Performance. Year: 2022. Location: SAIC, Chicago, IL. Not captured in footage is the full performance space that includes two spotlights, one empty to the right of the artist and one inhabited by the artist for the majority of the performance.

This work attempts to portray the self-sacrificing, nurturing, and sexualized natures of the mothering body exposed in space. I use repetition and duration to reflect on my personal maternal experience. I question the sanctified, patriarchal policing of the female body in motherhood through play. I play with dichotomies between the mother who gives or retains too much or too little. I performed the excessiveness of maternal labor, between monotonously stale, judgmentally selfish, and nourishing. I touch on the madness of the mothering identity, reaching out and exploring multiple materials to evoke the pathologization of the mothering body. Further, I express the reality of the queer mother by playing dress-up and conforming my body between what I am comfortable with and what I think society expects. The audio is a compilation of conversations between me and my son; my movements were exaggerated and pulled based on my connection to him through the sound of his voice. Although oftentimes exhausting and non-glamorous, I find pleasure in this labor. 

My body is unruly, judged, leaky, fluid, irrational, and emotional. I feel herded into a sanitized conformist corner of identity and existence that has a hard time finding its way. Can mothers find their way through play? Is play enjoyable or a means of survival? Where is it ok to be a mother, and what does that look like for me? Where, who, and what is my resistance?