Images from “Autobiography” MFA Thesis Performance
The Berkeley Art Museum 2004
The world I wish to create through my art is a world that one can enter and experience that is different from the world that he/she knows as an everyday life or routine. The work I create as an artist creates a journey for the viewer to experience a world that provokes thoughts about body, movement, sound, beauty, painting. My work asks the viewer to reflect upon notions and constructs of Beauty and the female body. I invite the viewer to experience the live event of performance, and think about how it is captured and interpreted. By incorporating my own body into my work as a performance artist, I emphasize the important presence of women's bodies in an everyday practice.
I believe that in my performance work I am addressing Issues that investigate limits in painting; expanding the role of the artist and the importance of the female body as producer within the painterly arena; the difficulties of the female body as visible and the ways I undermine/refuse a fully desiring gaze. It is the power of what we hold within our bodies and how we express that power that I find to be a very interesting aspect to explore.
I am interested in the way that painting might limit or circumscribe performance and ways that performance expands the boundary of painting.
My sketch pad, choreographing movements with graphite on paper for performance piece "Black & White"
"In Autobiography, I bring into play my extensive training in ballet and contemporary dance without actually giving the viewer a dance. Rather, I rely on my inherent knowledge and vocabulary of the physical self to talk about myself as a dancer. The wall here is a metaphor for self- my movements across the wall symbolize how I believe I move through Life. The wall is a hard, unforgiving surface, as life is at times. I think of how we feel or navigate through different situations in life: What happens when we stretch ourselves into uncomfortable situations? take risks? go beyond what we know? In the end, we inevitably come back to ourselves. The act of drawing and painting then becomes a vehicle for me to leave my traces. The performance is witness to a moment in time. I am editing the body form. In essence, the piece is about space, time, ad the mark pf the body”.