I am a female, queer identifying and Canadian born artist. My practice revolves around an analysis of the construction of truth through the theory of social epistemology which analyzes the way that particular social systems allow for various beliefs to be formed and circulated. Within the scope of this theory, my focus is on how patterns arise, how the information is distributed and the nature of testimony in its role in developing forms of accepted language and social navigation. This manifests in my work as video, performance and installation as both a direct analysis of the theory of social epistemology and as a basis from which I perform various ‘case studies’ of social systems and their languages through familiar visual cues, linguistics and personas present within the context which these systems have an adopted to form and circulate a particular social understanding.
One such structure that I have recently explored is the social behaviors surrounding death, such as funeral practices, dialogues cued for grieving and comforting and the languages present in film and television biographies, all established with an attempt to both cope with and organize death. The exploration of these systems often results as a revealing of various predetermined social structures in the final works by presenting a work which adopts the language of the system so that it can comment on the exertion of control exercised to maintain a social comfort in regards to death in society. A series of works exploring these ideas were video pieces in which I embodied both the role of the individuals who memorialize someone as well as the role of the deceased loved one. These video pieces borrowed dialogue directly from various true crime television shows and celebrity bio-pic, and created various false narratives and memorial videos, referencing the visual layout of these texts simultaneously.
The role of the audience and their gaze is actively considered in my practice, because of my intention to bring an external viewer into the work to promote reflective thinking about the proposed ideas. My goal within my practice is to create work that poses various questions and conversations that a viewer may not have previously considered about ingrained social constructs.
These ideas are explored largely through video and performance work, often incorporating audio, photography and installations. Through all of these materials I consistently bring in the body, very often my own, either thorough an actual representation of a body, my voice or a record of dialogue. This presentation of a human from acts as a basis of reality from which to reference the ideas being presented. Though I am often present in the work, it is rarely as a self-portrait, instead I treat my body as a malleable material and subject through which I can adapt various persona’s. These persona’s act as a form of impersonation, as they are often an exaggeration of a particular archetype of a person, an example of this can be seen in A Memorial to Someone, in which I adopt multiple persona’s which mirror the archetypes portrayed within various biographical films memorializing someone’s death.
Photography and video as a material acts as a mirror to many of these systems, because it is these forms of media, such as television and the internet, where many of these patterns are spread and replicated. This material choice acknowledges the way in which the types of images I reference are being distributed, as well as allowing me to produce many multiples and conduct several explorations within a single image. As a result, I would categorize my practice as an accumulation of studies which is consistently acting as a mirror to itself, and expanding the terrain of a system that I choose to navigate. I draw research from semiotic texts as well as case specific text such as Laura Mulvey‘s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) in regards to the role of the gaze, visual studies such as film and theatre, as well as material studies in studio which allow for an increased specificity in bringing up the questions for which I am pursuing answers to.