Dana Buzzee D
B

My practice explores the poetics of materials, speculative narratives, and the shifting boundaries between care, desire, and extraction. Through sculpture-based installations, I craft conceptual constellations that examine the affective dimensions of contemporary life, often staging architectures and objects that feel out of time and place. My work engages speculative futurity and deep-time storytelling, bridging ancient ritual forms with contemporary cultural detritus as a way of exploring what persists, what haunts, and what might yet emerge.

I am drawn to the material and visual languages of countercultural, queer, and feminist communities, including the semiotics of ritual, wellness, and resistance. This research has led me into both formal and informal archives, which I approach not as sites of extraction but of collaboration across time. Drawing on queer hauntology and disability justice, I posit care as a central concern in my studio practice. I strive for my installations to be conceptually maximalist yet physically sensitive, holding multiple meanings and understandings at once.

In recent years, my practice has turned more directly toward the contradictions of healing and wellness: how they are aestheticized, desired, and denied. As someone who lives with chronic illness, I have become especially interested in the ritual practices of care, which I see as a kind of proto-magic or cognitive technology. This includes both historic and contemporary somatic practices, such as medicinal rituals, bathing and spa culture, and practices of meditation, sleep and dreaming that resist the “logic” of productivity. These ambiguous, charged, and sometimes absurd states point toward the need for spaces that support not resolution, but rest, reflection, and transformation.

Ultimately, my work seeks to build environments where materials, histories, and bodies converge in speculative arrangements that challenge dominant narratives and gesture toward alternate futures, somatic fantasies, and psychic utopias.