Artist Statement

My artwork is based on a performative approach to multi-media sculpture. My artistic practice has been highly influenced by the merger of technology with the visual arts, which occurred in the late 1940's, as well as my personal interest in holistic theory. The result is a hybrid of performance, video, sound and sculpture, placing an emphasis on psychological process expressed through physical incidents. The work is a continuation of the exploration started by artists such as Bruce Nauman and Bill Viola who situated video as the interplay between the physical and psychological aspects of perception. Concurrent with the exploration of video art, an emphasis on the process of artistic creation over the formal properties of the artistic product, led artists to combine different mediums in an attempt to track and make evidence of their experiences. Performance artists introduced the human body and its functions as powerful metaphor for psychological, social, and spiritual conditions, bringing to question the role of the artist as well as the audience in the production of works of art. It is from these developments in the history of art that my work emerges.

Inspired by the performance art movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, my early performance work utilized the body either as raw material or as an object of movement through space. Ranging from experiences of abjection to trance states, I performed durational pieces in reference to various aspects of incarnation. In other early performance work I concealed the features of the body and utilized performance as a means of creating movement. In 2001, I began to fuse my performance with video. Rather than perform live in a gallery space and video tape the performance for documentation purposes, I structured my performances for the video media, prerecording, editing and then installing the video in various gallery settings. My use of multi-media techniques is intended to engage the audience through the appeal of its accessibility and to urge the audience into an internal, physiological response. My use of video focuses the viewers’ attention on the object of concern and provokes visceral experience through sound and action. My orientation towards performance art, live or pre-recorded, provides the audience a focus object with which they can identify. I find the presence of the physical body and the functions it performs have the capacity to emphasize the relationship between the flesh, the external world and internal psychological processes.