Artist's Statement
I am interested in issues of identity fragmentation, social awkwardness, and the meaning of death/memory in an era of persistent media. Much of my work grapples with the idea of conflict between multiple voices within a single subjectivity. "We," the (fill-in-the-blank)-modern subjects, increasingly find ourselves peering from behind a hodgepodge of multiply situated, yet potentially "authentic" feeling, masks. This is quite frankly an odd state to "be" in, and yet most of us go on being in it without displaying the slightest bit of outward confusion. My interest as an artist, then, is in exhuming the internal conflicts that we anxiously try to smooth over (and sweep out of mind) as we glide between different iterations of ourselves. In particular, I strive to capture that elusively seductive awkwardness created by a juxtaposition between voices of intimacy and voices of public power. I am also interested in the ways that the memento mori can be a kind of convergence of "voice"—in the sense that apprehension death brings our choir of multiple identities to recognize "one another" (as having parallel yet not entirely coequal stakes in this closure). In particular, I am interested in the ways that intimate voices "speak" from the grave through diaries, audio-recordings, home-videos, and family narratives, etc. I draw from genres of documentary, performance, and confessional storytelling, but if there is a definitive methodological consistency in my approach, it emerges from a desire to produce work that scares me. In this sense, I am both terrified and enraptured by the possibilities of "unsafe" performance spaces.
Version 11-25-07
Artist's Statement
I am interested in issues of identity fragmentation, social awkwardness, and the meaning of death in an era of digitized memory.
My approach as an artist is to try to exhume the internal conflicts that get swept out of mind as we glide between different iterations of ourselves. My initial interests in issues of multi-vocality emerged years ago while I was working in restaurants and experiencing my own uncanny transformations as I moved from kitchen to dining hall. These interests eventually parlayed into an experimental documentary that explored the "frontstage" and "backstage" personas of waiters. These interests also informed an experimental video piece that explored gender performance in bathroom graffiti. Another experimental documentary that I shot in Japan explored the identity transformations of bilingual speakers, revolving around a central question: “Are you a different person when you speak a different language?” This project inspired me to explore my own experience as a liminal subject in Japan through more directly performative work, culminating in a project called Gaijin.
Much of my current work still grapples with the idea of conflict between multiple voices within a single subjectivity, but more recently I've been interested in technologies that can force an uncanny awareness of ourselves as multi-vocal subjects. In particular, I am interested in the ways that the mobile phone can create incongruity or awkwardness through an uncomfortable rupture between "voice" and space. For the past year, I've been incorporating telephones into my performance pieces as a way of exploring how mobile phone technology collapses the distinction between the political and personal spheres of identity. In one musically accompanied monologue, I connect my cell phone to a PA system and call my parents in order to apologize for my adolescence and then proceed to ask them to contact their Senator in order to oppose warrantless wiretapping. In this performance, I was striving to capture that elusively seductive awkwardness created by a juxtaposition between voices of intimacy and voices of civic duty.
I am also interested in the ways that the memento mori can be a kind of convergence or conflation of various "voicees." In particular, I am interested in the ways that intimate voices "speak" from the grave through diaries, audio-recordings, home-videos, and family narratives, etc. In the future, I plan to explore the ways that people envision their personal media as being memorialized after their death—an idea which emerged out of vox-pop interview experiments that I conducted with improv actors.
I draw from genres of documentary, performance, and confessional storytelling, but if there is a definitive methodological consistency in my approach, it emerges from a desire to produce work that scares me. In this sense, I am both terrified and enraptured by the possibilities of "unsafe" performance spaces.
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