Jamee Crusan is an artist living and working in Oakland, California. Crusan uses their theory of queer exhaustion as a lens to create much of their work. Originally from the Appalachian mountains in Western Pennsylvania Crusan pushes the edges of politics and sexuality by utilizing mourning as a strategy to complicate systems of power. By encouraging viewers to re-examine their relationship to loss, grief, mundane tools, fabric, and even guns they explore the intersections of emotional and physical labor within relationships of self and other. Crusan's objects are often hidden with political latency and can be an unlikely object for the provocation of tragic beauty, self-reflection, and controversy.
Crusan's current project Hopeless Acts of Mourning examines individual and collective ideas of surviving loss while creating objects of protection and transformation. Done through workshops individuals are invited to bring and create talismans that are physical and psychic protectors.