Excerpts; original running time 20 minutes

antithesis

2023

Impact Performance Festival, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Galleries, Chicago, IL

LED illuminated paper sculpture, live-feed camera projection, contact microphone taped to my throat, live audio loop, heat lamps, honey on my face, raw shorn sheep’s fleece glued to my body

I seek a balm, an antidote, to ease and resist the alienation and domestication that I feel. I sense that you might also need this. Perhaps this work can bring me, with you present, closer to our animal bodies. Even so, I must contend with the inevitable state of being singular. As I navigate this shore- between a desire for individuality and a deep longing to be subsumed by the collective, at the threshold between me and we- I feel a tension that might hold my most honest form of expression.

Within this performance, I experiment with depriving and heightening my senses in order to render an altered state from which instinctual movement and vocal improvisation emerge. A shorn sheep's fleece is glued to my skin. I begin inside a paper sculpture with my face submerged in honey. This interior is captured by two cameras, altered to resemble microscopic or ultrasonic imagery, and sent to projectors mapped onto both sides of a wall. My vocalizations are picked up by a contact microphone taped to my throat and continuously accumulate in a live loop. When I emerge, heat lamps fade on to guide my movement. I gradually become bipedal and find a pattern of vocal melody within the sonic cacophony. My throat mic cable trails back to cocoon/shed skin, umbilically tethering me to the continuum of life that precedes and surrounds me.

Photography by Ji Yang and Eugene Tang. Videography by Ruby Que, Anna Johnson and Clay Mills.