statement

I am particularly invested in exploring how technology shapes our social landscapes and influences our relationship with objects and media. The interaction between audience and artist/artwork is fertile ground for this inquiry. To assert the conceptual agenda of a work, I use performance, video, photography, sound, sculpture, and texts from disparate sources interchangeably. My practice is largely project-based, situated in research and my interdisciplinary background, informed by methodologies from Bourdieuian sociology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, social network theory, and Human Computer Interaction & Design.

In my live performance work, I appropriate familiar forms of social interaction (massage, awards ceremonies, dunk tanks) and subvert them in order to expose their systemic logic. I frequently employ the devices of humor, hyperbole, and Erving Goffman’s concepts of “frame breaks” and “keying” in order to break down the alienating distance of artistic authority that often frames live performance. To this end, I manipulate the power and permission granted to the Artist in order to reveal the unwritten social contracts the audience brings to their expectations and experience of performance art. The aim is to create a space where naturalized cultural assumptions are complicated by the performance, become destabilized, and are then rendered ripe for reconsideration.

With video and photo works, I direct each medium in a way similar to my approach to live performance; I take the conventions of each and attempt to push both the medium and the viewer’s position into a place of greater interactivity. Instead of a static image, action is implied in the photograph. Instead of passively watching a video, I play with the expected form (movie trailers, long static camera shots, text as image) so that the audience might insert themselves into an active experience of the time/space dynamic within the work. Ultimately, in the act of viewing the audience becomes connected to the work in a sort of circular relation, wherein the audience is obliged to participate in the final execution and meaning of the work.

My intention is to create artwork that engages the audience to rethink established social dynamics, and functions as a catalyst to experience the mundane as a source of beauty, connection, and catharsis.