top of page
yourassisgrass-nika&logan.jpg

image from the Field Study series 

          I am a conceptual artist whose work investigates dualities and contradictions within the poetics of everyday life, with only the possibility of documentation, because an experience is never fully documented. The work shows gestures given a fluid form and language. Documentation as Ephemera, Installation, Site-Specific Environments, Intervention, Actions. An incomplete translation of an incident. Adding the matter of materiality to the intangible aspects of life, such as distance, memory, time, desire and how we experience, in an attempt to discern their inexplicable nature. Constructing an aesthetic relationship to approach others through the affective realm guided by ethical questions. 

         Thinking of ways to remember. 

How can we find ourselves within the everyday? 

What lies within a memory that has acquired the desire to be remembered? 

What is the embodiment of absence through the forgotten or the lost? 

Although, how do you find something that was never lost? 

         The materials are not found objects, but rather collected ephemera. The materials are a collection of time, a collection of memory and history, something intangible once again made perceivable. A formal dichotomy is presented based on the perceivable: 

the bricks, 

the stone, 

the documents, 

the door and key 

vs. the elusive: 

the shadow, 

weight, 

hiding material, 

impalpable, and ephemeral. 

         An emotional drive within the work becomes present through techniques deeply rooted in narrative, blending time, memory, and geography into a coherent, yet ambiguous whole. Narratives built through poetry, research, discursive text. 

Narratives built through storytelling as a part of the human experience in attempt to make sense of the world around us. 

Storytelling as present in history -- stories told by people in power. 

Storytelling in science through drawings and narratives built from a set of collected data.

        To have the power to write your own stories, to center your experiences and your own narratives is incredibly important when living in a world that often does not center our experiences and constantly invalidates them. 

         Performative gestures, then, are a practice of rewriting narratives that have been inscribed on my body and in the world around me. Performance as a method of being able to embody and enact aspects of identity that are linked to physical appearance, gestures, and behaviors as a product of social conditionings. Applying this to the approach of material, being so that they relate to a subconscious experience withheld from my past. 

Performance as an object. 

Performance as something found (but never lost). 

Performance as a memory. Questioning the ways in which a final form influences approaches to process, and in return, how process and concept affect modes of display and dissemination. Forms and processes influence research interests such as: Ethics of Documentation, Psychogeography, Situationism, Retroactivity, Linguistic Studies, Media Theory, Individualism, Spirituality, Mythology, Modes of Narrative, Queer Theory and Heteronormativity. 

         When placing the work within a social context, it automatically begins to take form through the product of conditioning, similar to that of the body. Life is an issue of boundaries. We exist because certain boundaries do. When a work passes through the mind and hands of its maker, it absorbs the subconscious experiences that have formulated the way we view and move through the world around us. I see this specifically in the ways my own body has been constricted into societal standards surrounding the sensitivities of masculinity, intimacy and desire as a Queer individual who has felt the need to suppress his identity, even to his own self. This subtlety of sexuality and denial bring an embodiment of mystery to the work -- there are hardly ever any clear answers provided. Whose weight? Height? An uncertainty mimics the tactics subconsciously pursued within my own life and identity.

bottom of page