Artist Statement
Artist Philosophy
How can I unearth a new touch with the below, above, around and within?
‘My work’ is a response to the collaborations with artists, family, somatics, friends, strangers, scholars, theories, travels, lived and daily experience, experiencing everything as political.
My work questions, then questions, and then rebels, suspends, then asks more questions
The potential of merging aerial arts and media technologies is to re-find touch in our changing relationship with grief in a post-touch era. Blurring the lines between embodied and academic practices, my research explores the novel intersection of aerial arts and a critical media perspective to investigate the liminal spaces where humans engage with each other through technology. I have devoted the privilege of performance to spark potent conversations, breech the fourth wall, and now, to ultimately use my aerial practice as a methodology to critically engage with the social/technological/cultural structures in which it operates.
My goal is to synthesize disparate discourses on touch with corporeal research to question the binary between the virtual and the physical. My meta-questions are: what is the essence of the etherization of bodies that happens in media and live performance that parallels death, and how can physical interaction counter isolation and nihilism in global communication?
Perturbed by my apathy towards news stories involving grief, I use my studio as a workshop to develop physical responses to death and innovate performance experiences that invited the audience to physically engage with the performance. I sought two commonalities: 1). The ethereal body after death and how bodies become ethereal through media-screens; 2). The parallelism of the audience’s passive-consumption of artistic and news-media performance. The audience encountered a juxtaposition between live and phantasmatic bodies in order to reify a contiguity between tangible interactions and media projections—a reminder that bodies exist behind screens.
I wrap myself up in aerial sling-fabric knots that fully hold my weight, which offer a comforting support that encourages me to feel the sensation of my skin compressed by the fabrics. Rather than dominating the fabrics with aesthetic intention, my body is responsive to the touch of the fabrics. I hover the ground, finding different treading possibilities and communications.
Screens disjoint our contact in a similar way that the fourth wall performance structure does. Both artistic performance and the performance of communication inadequately connect individuals/communities: they are missing touch. But, what is touch and how is it evolving globally? My curiosity centers on how the fabrics can link separated individuals through synthetic touch, essentially dissolving fourth wall screens through tangible and metaphoric tethers.
My body aims to unravel its “product-ness” of cultural, environmental and genetic writing.
I metabolize my kinesthetic and theoretical curiosities through my corporeal laboratory, maintaining a particular fil rouge, which is the juxtaposition between the pleasure of suspension and how this practice relates, dismisses and confronts the phenomenological concept of “being in the world.” My ongoing struggle is understanding Art as both the most sacred approach to being in the world and the most privileged and disconnected act to what is happening near to me and around the globe.
That is why I make within an ever-evolving process and I acknowledge it will change by the time I write these words through my body. In this space of constant shift, I have found my artistic curiosity.
Metabolization of experiences
Process over product
Finding more choice
Freedom is deceiving, but important
Art is unknowable, undefinable, which teaches us openminded ways of connecting?
The liminal space, navigating the unknown between audience and maker is Art
Awareness and undoing of cultural, experiential and genetic writing
Listening rather than dominate the space, collaborators, apparatus and audience
Slowness to see what happens in the slow
Fabrics provide synthetic tethers and touch lacking in human contact
Sense sensations, especially unknown sensations
Suspension ------ in the sensation of the body and time
Disorientation via floating, skimming the earth in sling, sling becomes unstable ground
Question by encountering broad systems of knowledge
Performance is an Exchange with audience, collaborators, materials
Collaborate to feel the multiplicities of an idea
Non-static-ness
Unfamiliarity permits space for indulging the unknow
Synthetic touch
Teaching Philosophy:
(See Artist Philosophy)
I teach how much I do not know, and what I am questioning. We exchange on this somatic journey together.
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