THE MONSTROUS AND FORMLESS HAVE AS MUCH RIGHT AS ANYBODY ELSE

—Found protest sign, Oakland, CA, 2014

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I am interested in making work that is difficult. Difficulty occurs when art is sincere and emotional and often from artists who are politicized and denied skill (as the successes of queer, disabled, and people of color must be attributed to essentialist mythoi instead of ability). To sit with difficulty is an opportunity to consider hypocrisy: is what we consider perverse actually amoral, or are we unable, or unwilling, to address preconceptions? What happens when what is supposedly unallowable looks, upon analysis, so much like what is allowable?

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In my drawing and painting practice, I zoom in where inversions (joy/fear, pure/impure, disgust/desire, filth/pleasure) touch and examine the tension between them. The meeting of conventional (ink, gouache, acrylic) and unconventional (blood, saliva, caulk) media becomes another point of stress. 

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My performance practice concerns itself with both the above question of perversity and relationships/power, in creating social connection through a cloud of affect. I aim to pull the audience from a mode of passive viewership to active—even, hopefully, to participantship—as the most dangerous person is one who thinks they are incapable of harming another, who thinks they have no skin in the negotiation of ambiguity. To refuse power is to refuse consent. To accept is to realize oneself’s full humanity.

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It is only in being brave and uncomfortable that we can dismantle what harms us, and that begins in gazing at the conflict we fear. Alternative realities and modes of being are not just possible or allowable, but essential. It doesn’t have to be this way. We are more expansive than we can possibly imagine.