I am a Multidisciplinary artist. I started as a painter, painting figures trapped within the two- dimensional space of the canvas. Working with clay to make man out of dirt, I added a three dimensional aspect allowing the figures to push out of the canvas or wall and invade the space of the viewer. I gave each figure a narrative sound track. They become my altered egos.
At times these clay heads come off of the wall, become a part of my performance and I shape-shift into multiple consciousness. I document the performances with video and photography.
Studying the common threads in international indigenous religions and mythology, my studio practice is a commitment to creating myth and ritual through the use of narrative performance art, video, sound, drawing and installation.
My Work is an exploration of individual burdens, insecurities, and self prescribed traps, walls, armor, masks, stereotypes that are worn/carried out of habit, comfort, fear, sloth and shame. However the work also explores our ability to transform, resist and escape these traps.
Looking at DuBoisian “double consciousness” and Jacques Lacan’s shape shifting subconscious I realize that we have many identities and like chameleons they shift according to our surroundings. They become “Multiple Consciousness”. Juxtaposing the contemporary practice of code switching with African and Indigenous ideas of “the trickster” my many headed series “breaking Head”, “getting a head”, and chameleon all speak to our ability to transform, resist and escape traps while exploring ideas of transformation, multiplicity, indecision, confusion, consumption, balance and fragmentation.
Simultaneously I make traps, tricked out spirit traps, consumer traps, comfortable traps, safe traps, traps that invite you to stay unchanged unchallenged. I work in whatever media gets my point across. Text appears as both sounds and large scale phrases that transform during performances. Drawings inspire sculptures, that inspire performance, that inspire video that inspires narrative, that inspire sound, the order changes.
I work with multiples, compulsive reproduction/repetition with minute changes that build to something dramatically different from the first moment. I experiment with weight and balance the whole verses the fragment. I am as intrigued by the material aesthetic aspects of my process as the metaphoric meta-narrative. There is often an aspect of my work that references child like play (sometimes it’s a tantrum) but there is also often a dirty joke and something fragile. I work on several things at once.
I consider my practice a play to movie production except the props costumes and storyboards are as important as the movie/play. I am interested in that which misleads and seduces and the potential of weakness and vulnerability as façade, as power, as regiment. Utilizing nostalgia and beauty to implicate/suggest that which is ugly, uncomfortable and terrifying, I explore the meta-narrative and the duplicity of meaning, the ironic and oxymoronic, the co-dependence of polar opposites, the space between words and the possibility for a change in roles for both the victim and predator.
At times these clay heads come off of the wall, become a part of my performance and I shape-shift into multiple consciousness. I document the performances with video and photography.
Studying the common threads in international indigenous religions and mythology, my studio practice is a commitment to creating myth and ritual through the use of narrative performance art, video, sound, drawing and installation.
My Work is an exploration of individual burdens, insecurities, and self prescribed traps, walls, armor, masks, stereotypes that are worn/carried out of habit, comfort, fear, sloth and shame. However the work also explores our ability to transform, resist and escape these traps.
Looking at DuBoisian “double consciousness” and Jacques Lacan’s shape shifting subconscious I realize that we have many identities and like chameleons they shift according to our surroundings. They become “Multiple Consciousness”. Juxtaposing the contemporary practice of code switching with African and Indigenous ideas of “the trickster” my many headed series “breaking Head”, “getting a head”, and chameleon all speak to our ability to transform, resist and escape traps while exploring ideas of transformation, multiplicity, indecision, confusion, consumption, balance and fragmentation.
Simultaneously I make traps, tricked out spirit traps, consumer traps, comfortable traps, safe traps, traps that invite you to stay unchanged unchallenged. I work in whatever media gets my point across. Text appears as both sounds and large scale phrases that transform during performances. Drawings inspire sculptures, that inspire performance, that inspire video that inspires narrative, that inspire sound, the order changes.
I work with multiples, compulsive reproduction/repetition with minute changes that build to something dramatically different from the first moment. I experiment with weight and balance the whole verses the fragment. I am as intrigued by the material aesthetic aspects of my process as the metaphoric meta-narrative. There is often an aspect of my work that references child like play (sometimes it’s a tantrum) but there is also often a dirty joke and something fragile. I work on several things at once.
I consider my practice a play to movie production except the props costumes and storyboards are as important as the movie/play. I am interested in that which misleads and seduces and the potential of weakness and vulnerability as façade, as power, as regiment. Utilizing nostalgia and beauty to implicate/suggest that which is ugly, uncomfortable and terrifying, I explore the meta-narrative and the duplicity of meaning, the ironic and oxymoronic, the co-dependence of polar opposites, the space between words and the possibility for a change in roles for both the victim and predator.
