| Statement
My work revises historicized ideas through art with goals to make the revised quirky, beautiful, and rigorous; from examining cross-disability interactions in plays or my own personal history across various mediums, to creating an accessible club or critiquing the legacy of protest. As Disability becomes more understood, I want to honor its nuances in our lexicon. I begin by claiming my diagnosis as generative rather than solely deterministic: hemi within hemiplegia also connotes hemisphere and therefore terms like “land”, “demarcations”, “power”, or “boundary”. I use these ideas to create meaning. The physical acts of caring for one side of my body reference and broaden these terms’ known definitions for me. I see them play out on my “hemisphere” every day. They narrate power struggles and benevolence and scenes of war so much so that I feel I merely reveal the seismic shifts on my body rather than create crafted work. When I similarly move in performance, these physical acts change from therapeutic to artistic because the disabled body already speaks in art’s language when it halts or circles or flexes. Within my revisionist practice I still reconcile restrictive diagnostic characteristics to my broadened interpretation: “spastic” has a complex history, yet it may exactly describe my movement in performance while generally honoring the specificity of disabled movement; possibly, even, providing others with language that distinctly references our culture. What if clinical became artistic? My art is intended for disabled contemporaries and successors so that we may all close the gap between being diagnosed and expressing ourselves authentically. Ultimately, my work strives to vulnerably reference various legacies to reveal something new about them. I love to juxtapose the ecstasy of gospel music with the pedantry of text to signal language’s variance; the boundless physicality of a push up with the architectural barrier of a single pillar to dispel confinement. As all these limits reflect each other, they expose a generative middle that affirms the presence of more – this is where I most like to create.
Disability information:
Hemiplegia Cerebral Palsy
Video Sample Reel
1. Many Ways to Raise a Fist, 2019, 1 min 32 sec
2. Relative, 2019, 1 min 42 sec
3. Breaking & Entering, 2019, 1 min 07 sec
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