artist statement

In my work, I look to make worlds where the body is important, where the body can be granted, where the body can make decisions, and spatially, have the care to persevere through vulnerability. These social sculptures are choreographed to reflect the daily lives of people, and are presented as tokens of gift giving. My work poses as a secular place for transformation to bring diverse groups of strangers together, and build a theology of mutation, light, and motion. I put real things--beautiful people, in real places--in tandem, and let them do their thing to generate a social situation that isn’t preoccupied with its own construction. In this way, my Choreography Mapping becomes a ceremony between nature and a moment. My intention is to indirectly point to our perceptions of what we are when we are alone vs. what we are when we are together, raising questions of our views of what family is. Drawing on what I've experienced as essential ingredients of family--adventure, nakedness, ritual and loss--I offer the public doors into alternate homes conceived of as interior events and exterior eruptions, positive and negative, without opposing context. In this outpour for others, value is reassigned. Social choreographies belong to a place and a people; relying on the transference from one body to another, it is a lost form of democracy. Encounter of the participants is unregulated. I don’t expect people to follow us for hours. I recognize the endurance ritual here. We touched each other for a moment. Through this endeavor for liberation I invite the public to become a collaborator, and family. My work is a rigorously crafted group experience that asks how far can we go together, in a world that feels like it's wrestling us apart.