sow: favorite trash you’ve collected:

RG: hard to pick an all-time favorite, but a recent great find was a super shiny, curved-yet-angular piece of a car (maybe part of a busted fender?) that caught my eye while i was walking a month or two ago. i've been thinking a lot about what being raised in a gridded city did to my subconscious. how i've learned to assume and rely on perpendicularity. this little warped mirror of a car scrap on the corner felt like an oxbowed river or molten lightning, its snaky, twisted curves giving it life. i want to learn how to let my thoughts and desires move this way -- fluid, flexile, non-orthogonal.     

sow: dream sidewalk find

RG: the dream is always to find something that leads back to a friend. a few years ago i had a moment where this dream came true. this was back when the amazing Dennis Dominguez ran Pachanga Press in the space Xochitl lives in now. i was walking and found a windswept risograph print snagged at the base of a chain-link fence a couple blocks from Casa Caracol (at that time, called Nurture House). when i picked it up, i was greeted by text that read "surrender to things that take time." i took it home and hung it next to my bed. a few days later i found another copy of the same print on another part of the street. i passed this copy along to a friend. i don't remember if i ever found out who the artist was, but i do know it was printed at Pachanga with Dennis. a gift from the wind! 

sow: what occupation do you think you held in a past life? what about your next life?

RG: i've got celiac disease, so i'd like to think i had a more positive relationship with wheat -- maybe as a baker. nothing fancy. just making bread, day after day after day. and in my next life i'm hoping for a non-human iteration of my "me" -- sentience optional.

sow: you are a fish!! what kind would you be?

RG: oh how fun -- maybe a pearlfish since they spend part of their life cycle living inside various invertebrates like starfish, clams, or most-famously, sea cucumbers. from what i understand, they also don't have scales and light can pass through them. not sure why all this resonates, but i'd love to see what it's like!

sow: tell us a story from growing up that impacted Paper Baby?

RG: hmmm...i remember my dad always scavenging things that people in our neighborhood left out on the street to be thrown away. a lot of times he'd come home with bits of cactus to plant, or a tool, like a broom, that just needed a little fixing. i think that same spirit has shaped PAPER BABY. lots of the things in the show are things i found and put to some new use. i love trash -- what can i say?

sow: any wisdom for the newsletter?

RG: yay for collaboration! nothing we do is done alone. let's visibilize the ways we're interdependent in our art and beyond. in the words of my dear friend maryhope|whitehead|lee, "we don't even birth ourselves, thank you!"