ARTIST STATEMENT
"I am obsessed with the development of popular culture over the last forty years. I am inspired by Andy Warhol and the philosophy and aesthetic of repetition, iconography, and cinematic sensibilities. I am invested in amplifying mundane and/or pedestrian movement so that it becomes scientific and virtuosic. I use performance-making and exhibition as a way to promote empathy. My practice identifies and magnifies opportunities where popular culture and human desire intersect. My work has two parts. The work unabashedly appropriates the structures, themes, and aesthetics found in reality television, celebrity culture, and social media (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook). Then it deconstructs them into new works which combine dance, theatre, and visual media. The aim is to challenge our audience to recognize their own implication in popular media: how media has trained and molded their desires, relationships, and identities. My movement-based performances combine fashion show, gallery exhibition, drag, stand-up comedy, minstrel show, and stage-play into a single, overwhelming, over-saturated Gesamtkunstwerk in which artists and audience alike experience their shared humanity. We bend, but don’t break, the specific formal rules of each genre we appropriate. We thus deconstruct each genre from within the genre’s own internal rules and contradictions. All of my training and background—Speech and Debate, Musical Theatre, social dance styles of the 90’s, my academic study of Modern Dance and English—have prepared me for the uniquely Warholian way that I rehumanize our over-mediated experience of reality."