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, April 13, 2010

death on the border


recently i have been taking photos of road kill. it seems to be in connection with the work although i don't have a clear idea why.

read about the debate around ricardo dominguez and the wishes for his de-tenuring. dominguez' latest work is providing a cheap gps safety tool for crossing the desert for immigrants to the usa, guiding them to the nearest sources of water and away from people who might shoot them for trespassing. now this life saving device has got some high up people mad at him, mad enough to have his own university turn against him. people die there, in the desert crossing the border. why is it a crime to try and prevent some of those deaths?

what makes drawing these lines across the land so precious? what makes people crossing those lines so dangerous that they would deserve death? why do we fear each other so?
http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n11/htdocs/follow-the-gps-225.php