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STARTING A NEW PHASE OF DAILY RESEARCH.

In preparation for two significant performance durations in December 2023 and March 2024 that will lead to an exhibition of ephemeral sculptures, I have begun a daily practice of moving on impulse, moving after reading, and movement in response to materials.

During this research, I will be reading:

theoretical literature (Bennett, Grosz, Deleuze, Morton, Manning, Ahmed, Bataille?) performance studies (Jones, Heathfield, Levin, J. Burroughs, Bogart, Overlie, Rethorst, Phelan, Laban) accounts of artists (Lillefeldt, D. Michel, Bellmore, Bruguera, Fraser, Calle, Mendieta, Kaprow) somatic practice manuals (Bainbridge Cohen, Rabin, Feldenkrais, Alexander, Decroux)

Alongside moving in response to readings, I will be speaking to my thesis supervisors and performance art mentors in Montreal and Toronto; making performance actions with my collection of materials and photographing results; and finding ways to generate the level of energy required to make a performance action without the audience presence that I have relied on in past performance making. 

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Flash Stratum. Light Gazing. Reflective Pools. Between Above and Below...? Looking for a title for this document of an ephemeral sculpture in Graduate Gallery, May 26, 2023. Materials: Steel disks, lighting glitch, artist body, wood floor, Back recording (un-noted musician).

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I will continue this interactive research at the Graduate Gallery from May 20-26. https://open-hours.tumblr.com/

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How to perform my own absence. ​

It's not about me, its more about my own absence.​

It's about the conversation of the window, the pillar, the ledge, the floor, the garbage can, the exit sign, and the air circulating in the site.

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Parts in hiding.

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Time at site.

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Magic lines for offering subtle resistance.

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Making art is practice for living.

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I call this last image "audience desire" because Shawn (i think that is his name) wanted to take these two colours with him. I said yes but I would copy them first. I like this idea and will have cards for audience to take away in future.

These are images from my under-developed Site-Time installation on March 9th. i was SO TIRED it was hard to sort through what I would present. I thought if I do it now I will learn something and now there is space and time designated for my critique. I had tried to book the room for the day before or the morning but it wasn't possible.

I called the work "The Duration of Colour" because i wasn't able to develop an oracular engagement given my lack of energy/clarity.

i set up the room with lights and objects. people entered. i was lying on the floor because that was an honest expression in the moment of needing rest but also i thought it would be interesting to say things from a horizontal position. I invited people to choose a colour card and breathe in the colour. I let conversation be loose. I got up and asked if people if they wanted to note why they chose that colour. I noted the dim lighting and were we seeing the colour we think we are seeing in this shady light pattern?

I said that was it, there was a further proposal that I didn't have time to develop. I suggested we just give each other our colour cards - as an attempt to mark the collective exchange embodied through this particular site and time in the glow of the critique room.

Most people left but two students remained and we were able to discuss a bit more. There was Shawn asking about keeping the cards and the serendipity of finding these colours here. And Patrick spoke about seeing a system of relations, a capitalist commentary, and he spoke about the substrate colours exist on and from where they act upon our eye, e.g. the colour on a card versus the colour of the concrete floor or the reflected colour through coloured plastic, the colour through the gels on the light boxes.

I would like to return to this critique room after doing (1) my own work with the colours, (2) my development of the world of each object, (3) with more time in the room to create the visual composition, and (4) with more practice in terms of how I feel through the moment in response to a person's unspoken question.

I had wanted to do the colour enquiry as a precursor to The Oracle Dance score - to give people a moment to generate an unspoken thought unique to this site and time, that I would try to respond to physically. So the breathing in the colour was a preparatory action to a hypothetical main event which didn't occur.

I am okay with what happened. We only have 20 minutes for a critique. I definitely created the conditions for my own resistance to occur - I didn't go through with the semi-hoped for action - though I wasn't able to transform that resistance in the moment into the semi-hoped for action.

I think back to seeing the work of dancer whose name I will remember who performed in the Leonard Cohen exhibition in Montreal. People were coming and going, but she continued to arrive at her marks and repeat the action. There were moments when she was incredibly close to audience and moments when there was no one there except myself viewing from the furthest corner - but still she arrived to that exact mark, that exact plan.

This is the opposite of improvisation in terms of the physical score but of course there is the improvisation which occurs in the sensation of these wildly different times within the same part of the structure.

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draft research question thinking:

Can I transform the resistance I feel in everyday actions into political resistance against oppression for the collective good?

I want to understand the roots of this constant resistance that blocks my ability to flow through daily actions. I believe that if I can understand this aspect of my psychology enough to activate it by choice - rather than feel oppressed by it - it will help me to act in accordance with social justice actions.

Maybe that is it - there's part of me that believed that to empathize with systemic oppression of others, I needed to acknowledge oppressions in my own life. And I think that is valid and needed but it's just a step in the process. Acknowledging my own oppressions can send me into this state of paralysis. So while I can empathize with the paralysis of others, it doesn't allow for a flow of change, the mercurial thinking-moving into more present ways.

I am more able now however, to notice this paralysis and slowly trickle through into the other sensory-rich side of things, the partition of awareness... the democracy of self to hear what has been silent through language of the body that is hard to discern. How does one learn a language but by noticing repetitions, associations, patterns, what follows what? What action flows from what sound?

I hypothesize that embodied "State Work" may help to shift this material of resistance, but also it requires me to notice the states that lead to states. I remember most deeply felt times wherein I knew if I chose the opposite action to what I thought I needed, I would have shown up in a different state, and that would have changed the course of my history. Month of Performance Art-Berlin, 2016 as a case in point. I regret not giving myself the instruction at the time: DO IT. DO IT. DO IT CHANGE THE ENERGY.

But there is a conflicting impulse to notice that rest is actually what is needed. While working in retail for 10 years, I had to drag my body to the job each day despite all anxieties. Coffee helped. I don't consider myself religious but I needed prayer - please God help me get through this shift. Please, please let me be okay today. I believe I entrenched the distrust of my body's natural need to rest in those times, but the earliest distrust of physical needs came more from age 3.

Now I don't have the same urgent imperatives to show up in a particular commercial-friendly state except when I sign up to teach somewhere I feel it. In the pandemic, I was able to give into rest more often. I had more days of clock-less time to dedicate to the deepening sensing lying in bed for 30 minutes before jumping up to get ready. But now after gaining 20 pounds and being unable to digest properly. I have to take that need for rest into account alongside the equally strong need to jump up at times and shift the energetic state.

Maybe the take-away is that sensing into the "resistance" can lead to many equally vital outcomes in terms of physical action. But what I would LIKE to do with my ART ACTIONS is to transform who I am, to become an active agent for collective well being in the world.