By the by and by and by... was an installation inspired by the writings of Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain), made for the Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill, where Twain lived for a period in the late 1800s.

What most interests me in Twain's writing is his use of time travel as a way of holding the past up to the present, explaining in a sense “how we got here” but also reminding us that we make our world. Twain takes extra care in describing the costumes, “props” and interiors in which the action of each story plays out. There are also many references throughout his work to trades, crafts, and the pleasures of manual labor. Twain delights in role-play, and provides many an object lesson on the performativity of identity, and especially the way masculinity and nationalism are performed. As the saying goes, “the clothes make the man,” and Twain’s stories are filled with accounts of mistaken identity and the use of disguise. These performative accounts serve to elucidate deeper concerns: walking in the shoes of others in order to understand injustice, or exploring feelings toward war and the role one plays in it, for example. Twain’s protagonists navigate through complex social realities in playfully mischievous ways, often doing the “wrong” thing in order to do the right thing. In his stories, he often creates a sticky situation, or a test, asking the reader to grapple with questions that don't resolve into a single easy answer.