I make performances
that screw around with
forms of identity
brought into being by the mass media.

artist statement

Exhibited face-to-face, as a live stream, or through pre-recorded media, my work joins the rhetoric of video art with the vernacular of low culture—the aesthetics of pop music, social media, and internet memes. I consider my creative practice to be a method of researching the effects of these media objects on the sensibilities of receptive consumer-producers. Alternately cheeky and earnest, my media-based performances and sound art confront the pleasures of the American Brand Identity as well as its pains.

Most of my work explores the role of language in designing the awkward interface we all call “ME.” Moved by an undying love of the verse-chorus song form, the tiresome but comforting clichés of television advertising, the plays of Samuel Beckett, and the frontal address of newscasters and vloggers, I use vocal repetition, pitch, and rhythm to expose the architecture of words. 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”?

Additionally, I am invested in the political potential of embodying a two-dimensional image. To this end, I often take still images from websites or magazines 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 and endure and invite the glances of others.

Central to my work is the idea of posing as well as its relatives—lying, fakin’ it, bamboozling, acting, posturing, and modeling, but also, suggesting, placing, offering. My practice poses questions that destabilize aesthetic figurations of the self. As an artist, I position myself not outside of popular culture, but hopelessly and romantically 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?

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