artist statement

I am not a whore in the traditional sense. I want to give everything for free. I want to give everything. I want to give it to you, even if you do not want it. I need to give this to you,
Now. Because it matters.

My work is silent but loud. I want to gently strip away your skin and touch you underneath. I want to insert a needle, or maybe a thorn from a flower.
How do you feel?
Please tell me.
These dances come to existence from a need to speak, to ask, to participate. The form that they take is the form that offers itself for me to find a way in. I am looking for a way in, into your mind, your body. The work is created in our meeting. It does not exist without you.
I make work to understand the world around me, to make sense of what may have none. I dance to map what otherwise is incomprehensible to me. I am attempting to see the world through a poetics of the body, which is to feel and to be felt.
My work asks what is important. What do we care about? What were the choices that brought us here? They are questions I ask of myself, and I try to lie less every time I answer. I go towards discomfort, because it is a mobilizing force. I place naïveté above cynicism: it does not make me look good but it helps me see what is here. I move in a guise of confusion, of embarrassment and not knowing, because the constant reminder of how little I understand forces me to actually learn.


Tuesday, March 23, 2010

march on airports

3.3.2010 I had a long day of flying. i detest the security controls at the airports, the way they make me feel fearful and the way they reconfirm the politics of fear that we practice to legitimize our different actions in the world. Going through a lot of those checks, 4 in one day, made me think about what i am working on with my thesis. The way that these policies and politics affect our bodies.

Landing from all that to Eugene, OR, where David Sommerville, whom i had never met before, had made cookies, warmed up the sauna and made a bed for me, was like stepping into a different world.

The things we do to each other as humans.
The way we create inhumane environments and force ourselves to live in them because it is for the best and because of our own safety. We create environments where we have to shut down our senses of smell and hearing to not go crazy. This then becomes normal. To live in cities, cars, highways, universities, airports, we have to handicap ourselves to survive.
And then there are places called Homes. Where you can let all your street survival mechanisms go. Doesn't it make you cry to enter into one of these havens? Have you created one for yourself? How does it feel?

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