Relationship status

single

College / University

Rochester Institute of Technology/Virginia Commonwealth University

Program

Photo Illustration/ Media Arts

Member type

Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?

Conceptual, Film, Performance, Photography, Video

I am...

a ballet and modern dancer and choreographer, a fine art photographer, a filmmaker and video artist. I have lived and worked in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Texas and South Korea. I have started groups like stringdance+media, and we performed at traditional and unconventional venues in the northeastern US, and screened videos at festivals. I directed the short-lived Southwest Contemporary Ballet, with a repertoire of academically-themed dances. This was in San Antonio, where I also performed with the Modern Dancer’s Co-Lab, with whom I created a number of works that collaborated with sculptors. I collaborate with other film-makers on philosophically-themed dance videos, some of which have been shown in festivals in the US and Europe.

About my artwork

I try to understand personal quandaries through philosophical inquiry. This has never been successful, indeed, it has brought about great strife, but it has served me as an artist.

I pursue the explication and illustration of intellectual and emotional content through choreography and visual imagery. I am interested in philosophy, history, and systems of power. I think it is effective to illustrate abstract topics in non-linguistic ways, so that audiences can understand the concepts. Examples given in language can be difficult to follow, I want to make examples that are easier to understand.

This is recent.

There are some formal things to consider. Since I started my career as a ballet dancer, I have made many pieces, as a choreographer and a video artist, that are rooted in ballet. I have combined ballet with other dance disciplines, classical and post-modern dance, Flamenco and Japanese folk dance, as well as with martial arts and yoga. The movements, and what influences them, are determined by the content of the piece. Dance and movement-based video pieces illustrate concepts either abstractly or by using narratives, but no dialogue.

This is not to say that I have never used language. Indeed, for a time I was a prolific writer and I have, from time to time, used bits of narration to lend depth to pieces, or in the case of “Buy Your Demise”, to make them intelligible.

Let’s go back. It’s all about the content.

In earlier work I was very interested in examining women’s roles in society and in personal relationships as they are formed. The choreography, photography and eventually videos that I produced explored the objectification and infantilization of women. The former is reflected in my continuous use of self-portraits that examine both the costumed “self” I present to the world as well as my (maybe not so) intrepid examinations of my more vulnerable “self”. The latter is residue from working in a profession (ballet) in which “men and women” remain “boys and girls” until they retire. While these are no longer my primary concerns, these themes will always be relevant and will continue to inform my work. I have shot self-portraits, both photo and video, on a regular basis in an effort to confront the changing nature of the “self” as we are and as we would like to be.

This content segued into a somewhat broader understanding of things when I began work on “Finished”. The narrative of “Finished”, as described in “Buy Your Demise” follows two young women who see their favorite celebrities endorsing a service through which one can purchase one’s death. The project, which consisted of two videos and three dance pieces that could be viewed separately or together, addressed the transient nature of celebrity, the insidiousness of television, and the unfortunate detachment that is so common in youth consumed by popular culture. I have created an imaginary popular culture that is purely solipsistic – the same actors play the girls, the celebrities and the proprietors of the service. This, of course, brings us back to the nature of the “self” and one’s place in the world.

Removed from time to time from my insular and intellectual existence in New York, I have begun to assimilate duende from the Mexicans (I know they got it from the Spanish) and han from the Koreans and whatever it is you learn from exceedingly efficient Asians and less ambitious but more life-loving Southerners in the city and the country, and eventually learnt to let go of logic, which is fortunate as my particular branch of philosophical inquiry eschews pure reason.

I am on an ongoing mission to interpret Jean Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” through dance. Some of these dances are for the stage, some for video, one is a combination of video, sculpture and performance. Nietszche pointed out the failure of language to successfully illustrate philosophical concepts. “No Exit” has some good moments and I liked Constantine’s conversion to Christianity and relocation to Byzantium (from “Being and Nothingness”) as a catalyst for the decline and fall of Rome so much that I made a ballet about it. But for the most part, I think Sartre’s plays are almost as bad as some of the examples in his texts. My goal is to make better examples. Thus far, no one has watched a piece and suddenly spewed the section of the text verbatim, but they have come away with something to think about. At the very least, they seem to enjoy the experience, and how often can you say that about philosophy?

Back to the “self”: Sartre’s work also addresses the “self” as well as one’s place in the world and relationships with others. So it all goes back to training a lens on my “self”. And my surroundings. I examine all that is around me with my cameras and collage these images into videos in which there is usually some dancing. I love to use costumes and locations that disassociate my ideas from time and place. This is not truly possible - the best I can hope to do is create an aesthetic that is culturally ambiguous and more from the past than the present. That is enough – my fear is that I will make anything that someone in the (ostensible) future might see and think – oh how early 21st century. To this end, I try to steer clear of any indications of existing popular culture, as these references change frequently. This is difficult to do as I explore my surroundings with my cameras, but I have managed to shoot video in many places over the past decade without ever committing a McDonald’s building to tape or film.

Oh, but examining the “self” and avoiding McDonald’s are not all I’m trying to do. I have an interest in archaic ideas, like the four temperaments, of which I have managed to describe one through a martial-arts based narrative film. I would like to illustrate an information-based system of power through an extensive mythology about a powerful and immortal Sun God. It’s a complex idea that will require a large cast, collaborators who believe in the vision and a good stretch of time. I’m young. Not enfant terrible young, (although, there are those 30+ enfant terribles out there – I’ve got half a decade left) but really, even five years ago I didn’t think there was enough time. Now I know, now I finally understand the real lesson of ballet class; one step follows the next.

Artists I like

Ahn Eun Me, George Balanchine, Sophie Calle, Jackie Chan, Chemecki-Lerner, DV8, Marcel Duhamp, Sergei Eisenstein, Jet Li, David Lynch, Pak Nam Jun, Astor Piazolla, Tsuyoshi Shirai, Josh Greene. I can't help but like Matthew Barney, other highly theatrical video artists whose names slip my mind, the incomparable Carlos Saura and Antonio Gades (a dancer's dancer). I like nuevo flamenco, Noh Theater, Classical Indian Dance, Slovak folk music, Balanescu Quartet, David Bowie, a crazy movie called Liquid Sky, Jim Henson, many of the wonderful artists I have seen on this site...

Interests

Sleeping, eating, staying home, reading philosophy, watching sci-fi movies, ted.com, nail enamel, palaces, temple food, vegetarianism, all kinds of things I'm sure I'm forgetting

What exhibitions are good at the moment?

I think you could learn more about that by going to front page of this site!

The centre of the artworld is

nowhere and everywhere