Through performance and film I focus on scenes of human interaction, creating and staging moments in time where reality slips and is suspended due to re arrangement of people placed out of context. Most of my work is calling upon memory and the disturbance of recollection.
I am interested in how performance and the everyday are documented, blurring the lines between fiction and reality, the diary entry, the moment, and writing/recording the past. Levi-Strauss, for example, writes about a sunset as it is happening and presents this text next to, and in association with, retrospective passages about events in his past. Like this combination of instant and reminiscent, I intend to create a nostalgic, quasi-mystical perspective (on time) in this writing. Text from these books and text used as titles for work became another focus. A satellite piece which plays on fiction and temporality, elements requiring time and alluding to the real and the virtual at once. Simultaneously prolonging the memory of the event being depicted.
My previous film work explored remembered fictions. Taking a character and (re) filming, re visiting them, interviewing them, molding and attempting to 'real-ize' a fictional persona, these same slips in reality happening, but within a discourse of fantasy and resulted in ephemeral performances and film works. This allows me to adopt distance from the physicality of the work, leaving it open and addressing the role of the artist as the organizer, viewer and author.
In recent work I am using animated characters in ‘idle’ poses next to real footage of a space, asking questions about our perceptions of what happens in the particular space and how, when you use a virtual character as an ‘actor’, you are in complete control of his, her movements and can map out the exact and endless interaction that you want. My interest resides in spaces activated by people in a particular way, hotels, theaters, golf courses and science labs for example. The real gives way to the fictional and informs the virtual space, but the virtual space doesn’t give back to the real space thus preventing or prolonging any point of resolution.
As viewers we associate with virtual characters/avatars, as they are empty. They are a dream and a ghost, even when in front of you.
‘Before’, my degree show work, is about the rehearsal, and preparation for an oncoming event. Limbering up for the possibility of a stage entrance that may never come and perhaps creating a feeling of melancholic desperation. I am trying to create an endless waiting for, freezing and looping of time in the ‘pre’ period, trapped and cyclic, the work never reaches a point of beginning or end. A two screen DVD projection, with a practice jazz drum sound piece, loop in an endless condition. Like a game played over and over, the joy is in the working out.