Artist Statement
My practice confronts the illusion that disconnects art, politics, and life as a set of operations persuasive to modes of definition. I view the body as a site tethered to the political and ethical exchanges that define a space. It is both representational and emotional, and the tension between the body as subject and affect is a source to my work as an artist. My performances and installations rely on presence and the energetic to acknowledge power as an intersection of relations. How can performance, in its temporality, relieve us – viewer and performer – momentarily from a feeling of separation, and unite us in another confrontation, a meeting of meaning that belongs neither to the performer or viewer but embodies the projections of both. Performance is the event in which I devote my body to an action. This dedication is a choice and choice met with emotional action can read as a demonstration, exercises that line the edges of political acts for resistance and/or participation. The energetic is that sensation that struggles for articulation by existing in and around fixations. Simultaneously beginning and ending, it interrupts and questions definition, always keeping the body in movement. I am committed to the potential within this experience.

“Directing Light onto Fist of Father” (2011) is my largest body of work to date, comprised of three performances and an installation on view Sept. 15- Nov. 8th, 2011 at Leo Koenig Inc. in New York, NY. For this work, I positioned a plaster cast fist of my father in the installation as the central object to frame a discussion with power. “Initiation” was the first in the series of performances. On the opening night of the exhibition, I stood with my eyes closed for two hours next to a glass shelf holding the fist as viewers accumulated in the space. I was the shelf and the body that held the fist of father, and in this position I was seen. To hold power is to be seen as empowered. The second performance “The Act” employed light as a tool in which to converse with the fist and its symbolic power. For two months, I visited the gallery on any sunny day, stood outside the space with a mirror, and directed sunlight through the window onto the fist resting on the glass shelf. To direct light onto the fist was not only to shed light onto the resolution of power, but an energetic act that positioned my body in a ritual that confronted the operations of power with a meditative study, obtusely projecting the fist as artifice in the path of the sun’s rays.

In the final performance titled “Revolution. Two Marks in Rotation”, collaborator Amapola Prada and I expanded on this conversation by demonstrating power as an appendage – a construct to put on or off. Using metal poles that mirrored the scaffolding poles outside the gallery, we wielded power over the space and audience that both the performers and viewers had to navigate physically. As two bodies, we broke the singularity of my earlier tasks, making the auteur plural and suggesting the unconscious collaboration between bodies that informs social constructions of power. 

The performance “Untitled Response to the Invitation to Respond to Works in the Hessel Collection” (2011) was part of the exhibition “What’s Past is Prologue” at CCS Bard, in which the curator Julia Paoli invited two artists to make works responding to pieces in the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Standing amidst the collection’s seminal feminist art works, I viewed the collection both with pride and as a site in which to critique the art canon. In the performance, I am positioned between Louise Bourgeois’ “Hanging Janus with Jacket” and Carl Andre’s “Intersects”, the white walls of the exhibition space, and the audience. Working from the statement that is written on one wall, “Louise Bourgeois is a master. a mass her. mask her. mast her”, I performed three actions on the Carl Andre sculpture articulating notions of mastery. These actions both interrupted the presumed neutrality of the space and the authority resolved in the two works by their position in the historical narrative of art. The statement pointed to the master and slave narrative exercised by the ‘institution’ as referenced by the white wall, directing attention to this practice of mastery as an act of erasure. In the same motion, my presence as a participant in this relationship illustrated that this practice is not solely an external or linear imposition, but part of a series of ongoing subversions and inversions instrumental to the arrangement of power conjoined with identity and subjectivity.

“Trilogy (o)” most recently exhibited in the show “Gap, Mark, Sever, and Return” (Nov 15-Dec 15th, 2012) at Human Resources in Los Angelas, CA, and combines three works stemming from the theme and symbol of a bull’s eye. “Contact Sheet of Nike Missiles for a Moon Calendar” informed the work “Moon Calendar”, a series of 30 inkjet prints that rotate daily to coincide with the waxing or waning of the moon during the time of the show. Bull’s eyes are drawn on the back of each print, and raised bullet holes are viewed on the front of each print. Before the exhibition, I performed target practice on each of the prints with a 9 mm Beretta pistol and 22 Remington rifle. The piece “Bull’s Eye” embeds a single bullet in the gallery floor at the exact center of the building’s ground floor. “Star Sound Wave” is a NASA sound recording of a bright star that is positioned at the door of the gallery, projecting the measured sputtering rhythm of the star both in and outside of the gallery. For this collection of work, I confronted the desire to penetrate interiors to feel and acknowledge an exterior. “Trilogy (o)” comments on the symbol known as a bull’s eyes as also a diagram for the orbit of planets as well as a shape illustratative of a soundwave. From this multiple perspective, I hoped to comment on the interconnectivety fueled by what I am labeling the “desire machine”, that example made visible by humans of racing forward and into – notably “the arm’s race”-and naming it progress. The work debates the notion of time as sequential, implementing a scarrred moon calendar in a circuituous movement that projects both pain and beauty in its daily act: a single page falls away and replaced by another. In a deeper critique of the measurement of time, I focus on the bullet’s utility to mark space, describing a bull’s eye as “Target practice to pathologize ego. Do you need to hold the gun to own time in your hand?” 

“Painting Rooms” (2012) is an installation and video with collaborator Leidy Churchman, presented as part of “Expanded Performance” Sept. 27-Nov. 17, 2012 at Stroom Den Hague, Netherlands. In response to two floor paintings made by Churchman, I installed six brass rod sculptures that intersected the paintings and walls of the space. The brass rods punctuated the space above and around the paintings, some pieces performed as interventions to the viewer’s path around the work, others behaved almost formally- stretching the room and volume of the painted colors. Churchman and I spent two nights in the installation, documenting our actions with the brass rods and paintings on two surveilance cameras. Our intention with the night shoots was to record our attempts towards performance, capturing the play inherent in our relationship with the mundane acts that were an inevitable consequence of the assignment we gave to ourselves.