Artist Statement

I am a choreographer, installation/visual performance maker, and cultural organizer who, through a variety of body based sculptural forms (mask, costume, object), transforms discarded materials and disregarded spaces into sacred objects and sites. Using the tools of humor and surprise, I attempt to capture and heighten the magic and mystery of the mundane and invite communities to re-view and re-envision shared spaces and practices.

My body is the first site of my research. Placing it within new sites, materials, and social constructs, I investigate its movement, capabilities of transformation, cultural knowledge and the social perceptions its presence brings forth. Starting with the private and personal, I navigate my work towards the public and the political

I am taken by perceived polar opposites and the tension that lies between them. My work often investigates the spaces between wealth and poverty, organic and synthetic, male and female, animate and inanimate. I question and complicate their co-existence as the platform for my performative installations. Amidst a fractured world built on binaries, my artwork aims to blur dividing points of categorization and boundaries of location thus promoting dialogue, debate, and connection amongst people of multiple and complex social, cultural, and political identities.

The tension in each material or site is a palimpsest; a holder of historical knowledge writen and writen over by the various people and cultures engaged with it. Through my performative objects and installations I hope to offer layers of information written over through time, development, erosion, and transplantation. I select sites based upon their history as locations of community interactivity and materials based upon their movement qualities and the social value placed upon them.

My research pulls heavily from observation of human movement, historical archives, and local knowledge/lore/ephemera. The materials I select to re-purpose come from a direct relationship to the site, reflecting either the natural or man made structures present or the socio-historical implications.

I believe in the power of collaborative endeavors and movements. All of my work is community engaged because i am always traversing several communities while working. I aim to dissolve public and private boundaries by taking my work into public spaces and inviting the public into galleries. Often members of a community (whether they identify as artists or not) perform in my work (whether intentional or otherwise). An important component of my work is interactive exchange whether this take place through artist and community discussions, workshops, or skill shares. In previous works I have transformed sections of the gallery into community sewing circles learning how to re-purpose discarded clothing, civil rights song circles and teach-ins, and community discussions on building shared resources, maintaining historical data, or re-purposing empty lots within neighborhoods. I employ my aesthetic of re-purposing and re-envisioning landscape, material, and historical representation with community collaborators to encourage connectivity, shared resources, and the cultivation of creative change.