Artist Statement

I maintain a conflicted relationship with second-hand looking and the mechanisms of retelling and restructuring events. The seat in the theater, the couch in front of the TV, the bus window looking out into the moving city – the comfort of closeness; the pleasure of a changing view. Passive viewing offers a sense of connection with the out-of-reach, the perception of pattern creates an illusion of comprehension and predictability, the comfortable seat reaches out an easy inertia. In reaction, I attempt to work in ways that break established frames of viewing by asking myself and audience members to step away from a static relationship to mediated spaces.

I seek to establish relationships that allow for a two-way performativity: situations that ask both audience participants and myself to engage in small-scale relational activity. Conversation and audience interaction are strategies that ground projects in lived social relationships. In Trade Talks , I arranged a temporary situation that offered an idealized space for conversation and invited aggregations of personal remembrances of local social change. The shifts in employment and populations created by the collapse of Pittsburgh’s steel industry generated a body of stories and explanations that people use to explain why the failure occurred. This project created an opportunity for participants to share their explanations for past events, and to relate those understandings to economic relations in the present.

My goal is a productive tension between direct interaction and the processes of abstraction and mediation that allow for the development of meaning. In the world of information, mediated versions of events are critical to understanding patterns and connections between local activities separated by time or distance. The intertwined processes of abstraction and mediation are intimately tied to processes of narration. I am interested in the channels of communication that allow telling and retelling to occur. Dominant versions of events draw resources and legitimation towards themselves and away from alternative viewpoints. Whether that dominance is gained by virtue of persuasiveness or through a hegemony manufactured by access to media and economic resources, other versions do not cease to exist. They enter minor modes of circulation: one-to-one communication, chat, hearsay. I seek to generate alternate versions and explanations that can enter these minor circulations. I often feel powerless when facing the order of things. Is communication failure humorous, poetic or simply pathetic? My interventions play consciously ineffectual tricks under the long noses of institutions grown far out of scale with an individual’s sphere of influence.

Much of my work is public and, while contingent upon location, is not so much site-specific as situation-specific. In Welcome to the C District, local relationships are explored as a basis for experimental forays between personal conversations, relationships between performer and spectator, and recycled literary, documentary, and media materials. The imprecise edge between which activities belong to performance and which are unplanned and simply concurrent functions to blur the boundary between the rehearsed and the emergent. When audience participants exit the performance, I hope they take away a heightened awareness of the motivations and histories embedded in everyday spaces. What appears in that blurry boundary zone is not always definable or traceable. Does that woman get off the bus to go to work, or to speak to me? Was that business asked to leave, or did the owner decide to close for other reasons? What I hope to produce is a lingering sense of potential social, political, and economic relationships floating just below the surface of daily experiences.