ARTMAKING AS FIELDWORK
Artmaking, for me, is a kind of fieldwork. It is a deliberate practice of investigating, recording, preserving—and sometimes challenging—the world around me. As a matter of faith, culture, and politics I have a social responsibility to document and articulate the struggle of the people I know, and to confront marginalization. I am (often) compelled to engage in storytelling. The artistic products I create often serve as creative ethnographies, documenting and responding to the events in the community(ies) in which I interact as an observant participant.
To that end, I am not interested in categorizing my work in general. My practice is transdisciplinary, and moves fluidly across classical / classic and contemporary boundaries and ways of producing art. I regularly work with dance and theatre / devised performance, poetry, painting, and film projects. I move fluidly in traditional concert and theatrical stage settings and nontraditional, site-sensitive, environmental performance spaces as well.
The materials of my practice—the human body, space, time, motion, languages and vocabularies, video, paint, and sound—facilitate a variety of lenses through which I can examine and discuss the human condition and experience. Those materials allow me to explore the rhythm of relationships, public and private spaces, as well as public and private memories. With them, I am able to develop oral, written, visual, and movement-based languages and vocabularies that serve in my quest to describe the shifting American landscape, and my country’s place in the broader human community.