Breathing Under Water
Breathing Under Water is a a series of flags built around the symbology of surrender (white flags), resistance (black flags), retreat (a blue flag), and traditional marine signal flags that communicate messages of distress, waywardness, and a kind of clinging to hope. These objects are seeking a power that is normally only given to language, insofar as naming things is what brings things into being in our culture. They are communicating in silence, seeking a way to signal without words, seeking to make grief, trauma, recovery, and the slow laborious practice of it be enough for existence, be more than enough to be seen, heard, and felt.
Each object has been reworked through hand and material—cotton yarn, repetitive stitching, and the accumulation of small, deliberate actions. Each piece is built through a process that mirrors the conditions it reflects: slow, attentive, and often inefficient, like cutting grass one blade at a time with a pair of scissors. The labor is not separate from the meaning—it is the meaning.
Beyond their objecthood, each flag signals a proposition. It is warning, question, outcry. Drawing from traditions of communications used at sea, in war, and in protest, they convey an urgency across distance and time. They are international and eternal. While each signal may not be fully understood, they are nonetheless felt. They ask the viewer to enter a space of attention, where meaning is not delivered, but encountered.
This work has been a return to the body, to personal exploration, to rigorous material investigation, but it has also been a continuation of place-based practice and ties to land and water. In all those spaces, a set of persistent truths lays the foundation for both this body of work and where the work is going:
We suffer to get well.
We surrender to win.
We die to live.
We give it away to keep it. (Richard Rhor)
Enlightenment, like recovery, is a practice. Not a destination. The work continues in this way—step by step, stitch by stitch—moving into the unknown, placing attention back into each action, and finding, somehow, a way to take another step.
Date
May 28 – August 8, 2026
Performance: “How do we move through this?“
May 31, 2026 at 4pm
Prien Lake Park, Lake Charles, LA
Flag-making Workshop
May 30, 2026 – 10am-Noon & 1-3pm
The Art Factory, Lake Charles, LA
Place
DPR Gallery
104 W Pujo Street
Lake Charles, LA
Lead Artist
Victoria Bradford Styrbicki
Contributing Artists
Lauren Moore
Photo
Jacob Kelso
