The Ripe Leash performed at Casita in San Antonio, Texas explores what unfolds when the mind and body poised for release are bound by bodily and psychological constraints, and limits become orchestrators of expression.
Within this liminal space—addiction, hypnosis and dreams emerge as thresholds between rupture and reckoning—where waves of disorientation open into portals of hidden truths, revealing distortions of consciousness in which acts of personal liberation are performed as penance.
As these altered states ripple outward, the mutable self is laid bare, transforming release into reclamation as The Ripe Leash exposes the body as the front line of reinvention.
Director | Choreography: Justo Cisneros
Performers | Collaborators: Aidan Rodgers, Erin Ellis, Laney Phillips
Music | Stage Design: Justo Cisneros, Shea McGilvray
Photography | Makeup | Wardrobe Design: Cleopatra Diwata
Preliminary stage design sketch for Harmonic Gutter, created for the performance at Contemporary at Blue Star in San Antonio, Texas.
Harmonic Gutter, featured in Mosh Now, Cry Later at Contemporary at Blue Star is a sculptural and performance-based work that transforms the gallery space into a portal of rebellion and ritual. Harmonic Gutter as a performance is a declaration of parallel universes—an unraveling of identity, time and space—where the boundaries between reality and the imagined self-dissolve into an act of introspection and defiance.
Contemporary dance performers, Taryn Lavery and Ty Graynor, serve as mirrored embodiments of identity to engage in a ritualized dance of reflection and confrontation. Through a hypnotic interplay of movement, sonic immersion and material symbolism, Cisneros’ invites the audience to enter a space where self-examination and external forces collide. It explores the liminal space between personal and cultural history by investigating idol worship, music as a sanctuary, and the desire to break free from systems of order. At its core, Harmonic Gutter is an exploration of rebellion against time itself.
Director | Choreography: Justo Cisneros
Performances: Taryn Lavery, Ty Graynor
Music: Justo Cisneros
Stage Design: Justo Cisneros, Cleopatra Diwata
Wardrobe Design: Cleopatra Diwata
VHS: Alyssa Grace
MASS Ambient is a communal night of deep listening and relaxation—an immersive tapestry of sound, color and light created by local artists. Presented in collaboration with Pease Park Conservancy, this edition of MASS Ambient featured instrumental ambient sets by Hannah Spector, Poem Zero (Justo Cisneros & Shea McGilvray) and Veneer in Austin, Texas on May 23, 2025.
About MASS Gallery
MASS Gallery is a volunteer-run collective of artists, educators and arts workers dedicated to creative and social action. They host bi-monthly exhibitions and events centering LGBTQIA+ artists, offer affordable studio space and residencies, and support BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ organizations with space for gatherings.
About Pease Park Conservancy
The Tree House at Pease Park, designed by Mell Lawrence and Clare van Montfrans as part of the Kingsbury Commons redesign by Ten Eyck Landscape Architects, offers an immersive canopy experience. Open to the elements, it welcomes people of all ages and abilities to engage in both playful exploration and quiet reflection. As the forest grows, the structure becomes part of its surroundings—shaped by sun, wind and shadow.
About Poem Zero
Poem Zero is the collaborative project of San Antonio-based artists Justo Cisneros and Shea McGilvray. Merging Cisneros’ interdisciplinary approach to sound, movement and material with McGilvray’s freeform saxophone and electronic work, the duo shapes compositions that dwell between mysticism and dystopia. Poem Zero draws from sacred music, industrial textures and performance ritual.
Photography by Nellie Clark
Land sculpture for the group exhibition, Collective Tales in a Concrete Garden in Austin, Texas curated by guadalajara90210 x Co-Lab Projects.
Languages of sculpture and upholstery are communicated by materializing salvaged industrial materials in order to illuminate the interconnection between liberation and fantasy. The work serves as a vehicle to unearth the subconscious by reimagining archaic objects of industry, technology and transportation to channel realms of the eternal and the unknown.
Materials: aircraft panel, analog tracker, bricks, electrical cords, latex, leather, pilot seat, polymer clay, resin, steel pole, white thread.
In a scenario where nature and the urban landscape intertwine, Collective Tales in a Concrete Garden explores the dialogue between organic elements and industrial forms. Set within a sculptural garden, the exhibition presents stories told through a variety of materials—stone, metal, wood, ceramics, mixed media, and living flora. Each sculpture embodies a fragment of a larger narrative, blending personal and collective histories that reflect on the relationship between nature, space, and memory.
Surreal figures, abstract forms, and unexpected textures emerge from gravel pedestals, which serve as grounding elements in this evolving narrative. The gravel, with its industrial origins and earthy presence, not only supports the sculptures but also frames them as key elements in the broader exploration of the balance between the organic and the constructed. Through the interplay of material and form, the exhibition unfolds as a meditation on transformation, coexistence, and the merging of natural and built environments.
Bodybuilder is a study on identity, escapism, and the repressed conformist experience translated through performance and experimental sound. Located on Co-Lab Projects' Sean Gaulager’s Ranch Apocalypse in Austin Texas, Bodybuilder seeks to channel an isolated landscape as a gateway to explore states of spiritual deterioration and transcendence.
Director | Choreography: Justo Cisneros
Performers: Jairus Carr, Anna Bauer
Set & Sound Design: Justo Cisneros, Shea McGilvray
Photography | Wardrobe | Hair: Cleopatra Diwata
Preliminary sketch of the land sculpture, Fantasy Bond for the residency and pop-up sculpture park Wild Ruins, Wild Orientations in Adkins, Texas.
Land sculpture for the group residency and exhibition Wild Ruins, Wild Orientations in Adkins, Texas curated by Megan Solis. Fantasy Bond explores metaphysical states of ascension by illuminating the cyclical nature of time through recontextualized materials and objects.
Materials: discarded mattress, bricks, cement, chains, soil, artificial fruit, artificial flowers, pins, styrofoam, plywood, recycled tarp, steel poles, super glue, nails.
This privately owned land hosted an independent residency and exhibition space started by San Antonio artist Megan Solis. Its inaugural exhibition, Wild Ruins, Wild Orientations, questioned how art is made and experienced when free from a traditional exhibition space, in a land strange and energetically charged.
The artists all made work that challenged institutional norms in modes of making and display. They ranged from performance that blured gendered pathways, to a composition of uncanny sculpture and sound; effectively opening up portals of blanketed history. Traveling to and from this forgotten soil created a potential transfiguration for its artists and visitors.
The Silk Flower and The Honey Bee is a performance for Wild Ruins, Wild Orientations in Adkins, Texas. It unfolds as a meditation on the cyclical nature of existence—birth, decay and return. Using a found mattress as both altar and threshold, the work inhabits a liminal space between dreams and nightmares, presence and erasure. The mattress—where many take their first breath and their last—becomes a metaphysical site where intimacy and disappearance intertwine, echoing life’s quiet cycles of renewal and closure.
Through sound, motion, and the tactile fragility of the sculpture, the work channels the ineffable language of the body in mourning, where the visible and invisible merge into a silent dialect of touch, vibration and light. The title itself invokes a delicate polarity, the artificial and the organic, the sterile and the fertile, the static and the instinctive. The silk flower and the honey bee never truly meet, yet their imagined union becomes a metaphor for the human longing to bridge worlds that cannot fully converge.
The performance, situated within the sculptural environment of Fantasy Bond, deepens its inquiry into fantasy as a tool of survival and revolt. It is an act of reverent disobedience—a refusal to accept disappearance without trace, a rebirth performed within the ruins. Through repetition and trance, the body becomes both conduit and ghost, suspended between grief and awakening.
Director | Choreography | Sculpture: Justo Cisneros
Performers: Jairus Carr, Oddalys Salcido, Anna Bauer
Music: Justo Cisneros
Wardrobe | Hair & Makeup: Cleopatra Diwata
Photography: Cleopatra Diwata, Death to Content