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.
These documents were sent to the Monterey County Clerk office and promptly rejected + returned.
Annotations by :
Rachel Goldberger, community member
Jessica Hartzell, lawyer
Anonymous lawyer using A.I.
Photos by Mario Gallucci