STAR REGISTRY

2026
20 framed certificates
11" × 14" each

Star Registry assigns twenty star names drawn from the vocabulary of adolescent sexual humor. Each is fixed to astronomical coordinates, assigned a registration number, certified by signature and embossed seal, and professionally framed. The language is juvenile. The apparatus surrounding it insists otherwise.
 

The premise is already an impossible one: that something as remote and unpossessable as a star might be claimed through an act of naming. Yet Star Registry treats the claim with absolute administrative seriousness. The documents meticulously certify names that have no recognized astronomical status. Nothing about the proposition becomes more true as it moves through this machinery. It simply acquires the signs by which legitimacy is recognized.
 

The work emerges from Trump-era America, where salesmanship, masculine bravado, and the performance of authority have become increasingly difficult to separate. The locker room and the institution no longer appear as opposites. Star Registry locates itself inside this collapse. Here, vulgarity does not diminish authority; it becomes one of the ways authority is performed in a political culture where the confidence of a claim can carry more weight than its relationship to fact.
 

The stars remain indifferent.