An artist statement, or an exercise in failure

“The application should also include a one or two-page artist's statement illuminating the artistic practice by discussion of such questions as sources of influence, character of the inquiry, and some suggestion of future directions the candidate wishes to explore.” –Uchicago Website

My work is sometime. I call it work because there is no pleasure in structuring a landscape of utter vulnerability.
An artist statement assumes similarity between differences. In theory, the objects, performances, texts and/or films linguistically inscribed here will line up with the visible, the seen and the experienced.
It also assumes ‘the artist’ as a self-determined subject.
Both are fallacies of the modern artist’s identification with verbal certainty.
At least some purpose of the work needs to be commentary.
What goes on inside of process is far too complex and quick for words to barely begin accounting for. I can say ‘dance does this,’ or ‘these decisions were made.’ But actions do more than the words used to describe them. Dance, especially, as a lasting site of action in this contemporary moment of late stage capitalism, matters in its mobility alongside consistent de(con)struction of peoples, cities and lands.
I cannot offer what I do not have.
Dance is when I am safe.
Dance is where I am comforted.
Dance is how I hold on.

My work models a subjective/objective loop through offering experiences I can document, journal and record. Inside of the container dance offers, I can experiment, trying out personalities, relational strategies and events. It recuperates bad memories into non-traumatic, integral strands of my personal narrative. I can re-try in rehearsal. I can try again and do it better this time. But it is more than pretend. The subjective experience leaves indelible traces onto objective certainty. The community formed transcends a studio’s spatial coordinates. Dance shows me how to be around others. Imaginative acts help me reach a place that I do not know is there, but know I am capable of making.
During this school year, I tried finding this process by watching, experiencing, borrowing, replicating and stealing the process of choreographers whose work I admire. I closely researched how each person made choices, trying not to figure out how they made decisions, but what I perceived their decision-making to be.

My process appropriates from Beauty, memory, landscapes of desire and arguments. It is not constructed in a vacuum, I promise. It is in dialogue with contemporary politics, food policies, feminisms and conversations over cups of tea. It is shaped by manifestoes, the fact the wars are not over, a need to recycle and compost. It is sometimes reactionary against the fact the U.S. spends more on arms than on food for its citizens.
I like making things that are other things altogether.
Situations in between gaps.
The work does not need a home.
Imaginations for the future include acquiring fluency to infiltrate centers of mass commodification and transform these sites into permacultural tropes utilizing economies of bartering and gifting. Also looking forward to learning Final Cut Pro and Dreamweaver, remapping private and public spaces, homesteading, performing in silence and listening to the carrots grow.
Irony is not enough