ARTIST STATEMENT, 12/19

In my multidisciplinary new media practice I create critical software, video installations, and real-time performances to initiate conversations about power and control. The work often critically engages the technical language of instruction, especially the aesthetics and mechanics of practices from queer feminist BDSM communities, to direct viewers to read, play, or listen their way through narratives that guide them in and out of visceral memories, asking them to confront difficult emotions like desire, shame, or regret and to employ them as mechanisms to navigate through and/or away from abuses of power. I approach constructing this choreography of viewership through decidedly black, queer, feminist disciplines, forefronting agency and consent within the experience. 

Text appears frequently in and around my work, recognizing fiction and poetry as powerful methods of forging connections with audiences through the sublime. I consider architectural theory as a support for directing the flow of bodies, gazes, and access to create obstacle-course like structures that demand specific physical movements from the viewer in order to see the piece as it was intended—most recently in a videogame called 005_POWER.TRANSFORM=ROTATE(180DEG).EXE (2019), where June Jordan’s radical architectural interventions become a model for intervening on the power imbalances facing characters in THE CHAMBER SERIES (2017-), an investigation into queer relationality, but also in my ongoing interventions into the ways that coding is taught and deployed in the mainstream that reinforces the cis white maleness of online space. Throughout my practice, sound- and screen-based works, mediums that white art markets acknowledge as valuable, share an equal role as an important site for presentation and sensorial engagement to lure viewers into unfamiliar digital and thematic territories via their most identifiable, familiar forms.