How do you describe your own art practice?
Heavily saturated, freely associative, emotionally purging, cerebrally stimulating, feminine. Reclaiming the context of an increasingly absurd, narcissistic, and materially doomed global backdrop.
In general, I’m sampling and hyper-mediating observable (usually self-documented) social negotiations and abstracting/hacking their associated devices and platforms. I’m really interested in the human urge to take selfies. Per project, I’ll use historical symbols, myths, newsworthy events, or futuristic scenarios to focus my looping investigations into specific scenes or characters. This turns into music, videos, texts, and collages that can be seen and heard in installations, performances, and online streams.
What was your first experience with art?
Probably seeing The Nutcracker for the first time. I became and remained completely obsessed with the music and choreography of the Arabian Coffee dance, a role I was ecstatic to get to perform when I was around 16. I stopped with ballet when I went to university, but I think that my experiences growing up as a dancer built the foundation of pretty much my entire perspective on art practice, performance, and the how and why of keeping on with it.
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
Not getting what I want. It sounds maybe a bit masochistic at first, but I get a lot of energy from outright rejection, failure, or inability to connect the dots the way I planned. Getting dumped, going broke, getting fired, making a fool of myself, or just having to give up one thing for the unguaranteed possibility of another. These moments give me something to prove — not to anyone else, but definitely to myself.
What do you need in order to create your work?
Food, sleep, friends. Somewhere not too densely populated to go for a walk when I feel like it. A room I can be in, ideally alone and unscheduled.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m expanding a body of work I’ve been busy with for about a year now. I’m preparing a new performance version of video pieces I made in the last year, transforming digital images I created into costumes and backdrops that can be experienced live in space instead. I’m also well into the production of a new full-length music album.
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
Konstantin Guz, a friend of mine, just opened a new exhibition called “Untitled experiment with no image.” He’s made a series of videos and digital prints using the “invisible” elements of Photoshop. Basically he uses operations that are native to the Photoshop interface to manipulate the transparency layer and the grey and white checkerboard image that represents emptiness or blank space in an image. The results are abstract and psychedelic, but hinting at their source just enough to be the right amounts of exciting, clever, and personal.
