(Things)
reverse archeology
a labor of love
cartoon body
cartoon world
pathetic forms
a practice of attention
a prayer without words
play and play
being and being with others
an archive of feeling (and being felt)
How do we come
together?
A Body Without Organs (Installation)
2025
Site-responsive performance installation; paper mache, fabric, ropes, thread, pool noodles, wire, plastic, wood, porcelain, PVC tubes, pulleys, sound tubes, bells
20'×8'×7'
An industrial caged-trailer reimagined as a living organism, animated through playful interactions between people, objects, and landscape. Acts of touching, ripping, tying, making, and unmaking turn bedsheets into flesh, ropes into guts, and plastic, paper, and wood into bones, all weaving in and out of the rigid metal grid. Periodically activated, exposed to the elements, and under 24-hour public viewership, the installation exists in a constant state of transformation.
Presented for Cage Match Project: Round 25
at the Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, TX.
A Body
A Body Without Organs (Performance)
2025
45-minute public performance in collaboration with Leo Briggs, featuring Angel Blanco and Venese Alcantar
Part 1: November 7th, 2025, at 7:30pm
Part 2: November 15th, 2025, at 6:00pm
Developed through thirteen hours of rehearsals, this improvisational collaborative performance investigates the boundaries between self and other. What does it mean to be inside the cage? What does it mean to step out of it? Throughout two public activations, performers and audiences move in and around the installation, animating it as a living, labyrinthine vessel. The body, with its porous and messy limits, becomes both site and instrument for communally exploring difference, between subject and object, human and nonhuman, agency and passivity, and innocence and control.
Presented for Cage Match Project: Round 25
at the Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, TX.
Video documentation by Tova Katzman
A Play
The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars (Installation)
2025
Site-responsive performance installation; drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, found objects, performance documentation, and other ephemera.
12' x 12' x 28'
A constellation of interactive sculptures made from paper-mache, cardboard, fabric, and found objects. At the center sits an oversized tiger head and a spigot made from aluminum foil; orbiting these are a flower, a horse, stars, and props like ropes, fabrics, cue cards, megaphones, flags, radios, ladders, a harmonica, and a copy Larry Mitchell’s 1977 manifesto The Faggots and their Friends between Revolutions. Two monitors display camcorder recordings made by audience members during public outdoor activations. Porcelain bones, shaped, carefully placed, and stumbled over during a solo durational performance, remain on stage. The installation stood as a living monument to the world-making potential of play and performance.
Presented for the 2025 MFA Thesis Show, Acceleration without Arrival
at the Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX. (April 18 – May 10, 2025)
Photos by Alex Boschenstein
A flower
Camcorder footage
a harmonica
a megaphone,
and Larry Mitchell's The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions
The Tiger
Dubious body of water
The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars (Performance)
2025
On Sundays, and sometimes Tuesday nights, a porous community of queer movers and feelers gather on a patch of grass, sometimes in-doors, and sometimes on-stage. The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars is a collaborative practice of touch, precarity, and care, of choice and play, of world-building and story-telling. It brings people into a communal search for liberation in feeling out-of-place. Occasionally, this happens in public, and an audience witnesses.
16 hours of rehearsal and three 45-minute public performances in collaboration with Leo Briggs, featuring Venese Alcantar, Angel Blanco, Sofie Cardinal, Emily Heath, Aída Hernandez-Reyes, Sam Mandelbaum, Micah Senter, Katherine Vaughn, and Joshua Winn.
Part 1: April 8th, 2025 at 5:00pm
Part 2: April 10th, 2025, at 12:30pm
Part 3: April 11th, 2025, at 3:00pm
Presented for The Cohen New Works Festival 2025, Austin, TX.
Part 4: June 28th, 2025 at 8:00pm
Presented in a backyard, Austin, TX.
The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars reimagines the material world, the hand-made, the non-human, and the space around us as familiar skins to become reacquainted with through considered touch. Play puts imagination at the front of every social encounter, enacting new ways of relating to ourselves, others, to objects and things, and to place. We build and enact a world ever transformed by desire and the collective—by our erotic and political imaginations.
Video documentation by Tova Katzman
Photos by Phoebe Shuman-Goodier
A rehearsal
A performance
A star
A sign
A victim of circumstance
A ladder
A flower
A speech
A play
An exit
No I, no here, no now
2024
Monotypes, frescos, and porcelain bones, exploring the cartoon body as a metaphor for queer being, blurring boundaries between self, others, and landscape. Drawing on cartoon logic and archaeological forms, it envisioned a collective origin myth beyond linear time and singular identity.
Follow your nose
a first dance
Feeling an being felt
Bent
Over
A second skin
Bare bones
You Are Here
2023
A solo show gathering work created over five years living and working in Williamstown, MA. Through cartoon forms blurring reality and imagination, the work reflected on identity, distance, and the search for belonging. It examined how being and feeling out of place can open new ways of understanding ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.
collection of weapons found in the empty lot next to my house, sticks, metal, twine, colored pencils on rocks, paper, and a fly, 2022
nowhere, hand-sewn quilt, 2021
about
Javier Robelo (b.2000) is multidisciplinary artist from Managua, Nicaragua, exploring the liberatory potential of feeling out-of-place. Across drawing, print, sculpture, and performance, he excavates and celebrate queer feeling—making and moving slantwise to dream, build, and enact other worlds. Inhabiting spaces of not-knowing, he turns to improvisational collaborations with materials and with others as praxis for constructing queer cosmologies.
His drawings and prints depict cartoon bodies pollinating, knotting, and transforming their surroundings, and cartoon worlds that respond with comically exaggerated, opposite reactions. Cartoon logic reimagines skin not as the limit of the self but as a connective tissue to the other. Javier makes this ethos material in colorful sculptural constellations that anticipate being danced with, sweated on, and pulled apart. In playful gatherings and performances, participants and witnesses animate these amalgamations of difference to reimagine social orders, finding pleasure in transformation and the in-between.
He received an MFA in Print and Sculpture from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in Art History and Studio Art from Williams College. He has been an artist in residence at Bunker Projects (Pittsburgh, PA) and Cage Match Project (Austin, TX). He has exhibited his work at The Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA), The Joseph Gross Gallery at the University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), and the Visual Arts Center (Austin, TX).
Photo by Tova Katzman