artist statement

I make performances that mess around with forms of identity brought into being by the mass media. Presented both live and on video, my pieces join the rhetoric of body art with the vernacular of low art—the aesthetics of pop music, social networking websites, Internet memes, and youth slang. Alternately cheeky and earnest, I confront the pleasures of the American Brand Identity as well as its pains. 

I am invested in the political potential of embodying a two-dimensional image. To this end, I often take still images from websites and other artifacts of visual culture and perform them as tableaux vivants. At the uneasy intersection of photography and choreography, the tableaux are then activated by the addition of spoken text, song fragments, simple actions (such as crawling or marching), constructed environments or backgrounds, and a viewing audience. My goal is to encourage viewers to consider the power dynamics inherent in acts of looking and the ways in which we endure and invite the glances of others.

Additionally, my work explores the role of language in structuring the self. Moved by an undying love of the verse-chorus song form and the plays of Samuel Beckett, I use vocal repetition and rhythm to expose the architecture of words. I am especially interested in finding phrases that shape subjects (in either small or large ways) and in treating these words like things among things. Most importantly, my performances attempt to measure the space between the buildings of “I,” “you,” and “we.” This is the space of treachery and of desire. What gardens grow between “fuck you” and “my bad”?

Central to my work is the idea of posing as well as its relatives—lying, fakin’ it, acting, posturing, and modeling, but also, suggesting, placing, offering. My practice poses questions that destabilize linguistic and visual figurations of the self. As an artist, I position myself not outside of popular culture, but hopelessly within it, embodying the products of Big Business and Big History. All of my work walks the drunken line between real and fake, narcissistic and altruistic, active and passive. How do the mass media make us all assume the position, and why do we sometimes like it?