Artist Statement
Working with elements of theater, sculpture, cinematography, and collage, I use people, objects, and Xerox reproductions to depict a narrative or describe a set of activities. I am interested in the ephemeral, jury-rigged qualities of the logics that shape our understanding and appreciation of the real, and the ways in which an individual interacts with his or her surrounding environment, both imagined and physically present.

In negotiating the spaces between the real and the represented, objects and subjects, the alienated and the integrated, and the 2nd and 3rd dimensions, I am trying to create a language that manifests its own system of relations and understanding. This system of relations establishes a new context; a closed narrative in which aspects of this established context are being exhausted, revealing its fragility, both formal and conceptual.

In my projects characters form an active part of the sets.  Their activities create the context within which the narrative takes place and their existence depends on their interaction with and their maintaining of that context.  In this way, they are intimately related. The characters’ psychological journeys are both represented and complicated by the set and their activities and gestures in it become a struggle for survival, evoking anxiety, necessity, and constrain.  
   
My fascination with objects is rooted in their ability to contain values and the strict dependence of their meanings on the social systems of which they are a part or in which they are observed. In The Wall (color video, 2008)  a brick wall backdrop is torn apart by a red high-heel shoe, revealing its materiality as paper and the fragility of objects in relation to their meaning. Later we see the Xerox machine character attempting to glue together a “real” brick, using paper glue stick; a sad attempt at piecing together meanings and functions of a fragmented system of symbols yearning for a lost experience of wholeness and presence in a world of endless representations.


In Grayscale (a video in three acts, 2009), office supplies become characters, evolving from found objects in act one into active subjects in act two.  As subjects, the office supplies characters gain access to their own materiality and thus their functional qualities.  With this newly manifested agency they are able to transform their environment by applying those qualities to other elements that surround them.

In the trajectories of these narratives, the individualized objects become integrated into the tenuous and vulnerable logic of their surroundings.  Through this active participation, they reach a level of intergradations and become part of the syntactical structure of their climate, and thus transparent.  The desire to become transparent stems from a drive to escape the continuous flux in and out of representation and is itself exhausted by the mechanisms of manifestation and perception.

The whiteout character, for example, is whiteouting the black keys of the piano, while the highlighter character is highlighting the white keys.  Through these gestures both the actual and the representational elements of the structure are exhausted as they are being actualized.  The scene ends with the whiteout bottle dropping to the floor and dripping itself empty, depleting its functions both as a container and as a representation.

http://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/THE_WALL,_still_image_from_video(1),2008.jpghttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/green_2.JPGhttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/green_2.JPGhttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/1Snowwhite_.jpghttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/1Snowwhite_.jpghttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/1Dry_Clean.jpghttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/1Dry_Clean.jpghttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/1Dry_Clean.jpghttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/1Hairy_Mountains.jpghttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/1green_2.JPGhttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/1pink.JPGhttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/1THE_WALL_1,_still_image_from_video(2),_2008.jpghttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/1THE_WALL_2,_still_image_from_video(1),2008.jpghttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/2High__Dry_2.jpghttp://rhmfoundation.org/collect/images/uploads/HD.jpg