Conceptual & Installation Art
Durational Performance
Poetry & Theory
GROUNDWORK & THEORY
My first conscious act as an artist was a durational performance where I explored expression as a human impulse, the irrepressibility of the way our bodies are designed to express, and the basis for human perception. . .
I sat within the tall empty frame of what used to be a stand-alone bookshelf: partially nude with arms raised, my back towards the audience. I had whimsically enlisted an audience member to facilitate my performance. In a robotic manner, he read aloud a script meant for introducing the human species to a futuristic generation. Then one-by-one he flamed each wick from the rows of tealights that were suspended above me.
Drips of wax formed and fell like hot rain down my shoulders. Quicker and quicker I'd feel their bite, only to softly mend with my skin. My breath fogged the glass of the picture frame strapped to my face. I persisted to sit motionless and within moments, entered effortlessly into an exhilarating meditation.
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Suddenly, I heard a voice intervene, "I can't, I need to end this..." It brought me back to the present where I realized that the audience were still my same human. Her protest stopped my performance short - but then again, I hadn't even envisioned an end.
This piece, Preserving the Flesh, inadvertently laid the foundation for my method. It also sets the tone for my work.
In my artistic endeavors, as in life, I've come to believe more and more in the virtue of the incident. Whether I am less of an artist because of this has proven to be insignificant because the work - if it is a work of art - always finds a way of coming into its own. My duty is primarily to reconstruct the portals through which ideas enter the present.
Yet even the form that my installations take are never as strict as they initially appear. At the exhibition stage, I heed each artistic invention and rendition to the variables of experience and let the process become guided by the dynamics that come into play.
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My aim is to leave as much of the task of disseminating ideas to the artistic process so that its mechanism may come to light. . .