Trespassers
2026
Embroidered velvet, shadowbox, mirror, vinyl, printed matter
Big Sur, California
The banana slug, fire & chaparral, and fog are entities that predate every property deed ever filed in California. Three shadowboxes hold embroidered depictions of each and beneath the velvet, a deed.
I drafted property documents that named them as grantees. Then I asked other people to read them.
- Rachel Goldberger, a community member, read with the eyes of someone who has lived close to this land.
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Jessica Hartzell, a lawyer, read with legal precision: noting what would hold up, what wouldn't, what the language was doing.
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An anonymous lawyer read with the help of A.I.
Having other eyes on the document mattered more than I expected. It changed things. The annotations made visible what I had been too close to see: where I was too earnest, where the legal register slipped, where something true was hiding under something clever.
The work holds two things at once: the absurdity of what a deed cannot hold and the fact that such documents have always been enough to change whose land this is.
Annotations by :
Rachel Goldberger, community member
Jessica Hartzell, lawyer
Anonymous lawyer using A.I.
Photos by Mario Gallucci