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My conceptual practice includes installation, film, shadow theatre, hand-made animation and objects, prints and drawings. I work with themes of modern allegory & euphemism in narrative structures exploring the language of theatre, folkoristics, history and material culture and how they play out in the personal and political arena. Currently, using paper, light, tinsel, food, drawings and puppets, I create a private folk theatre within the play space of the velvet light trap I use for animation.
In the installation A Self Made House, (2009) the viewer enters a golden membrane like curtain, drawn in by sound and light. She is asked to commit to the time and spatial nature of the piece by the performance of this action. Inside is a projection; A strange family folk tale captured on low-end video told to me by my stepfather shortly before he died and mirrored with my own revisions in both film and stop motion animation. His story is told in a self-made reflexive improvisation, at once terrifying, beautiful and hilarious and includes a giant hog that tries to bite the hands off of two sisters, a house that makes its-self and an occupation of this house by a “successful bad witch”.
Conceptually A Self Made House is an unquantifiable interpretation of a mysterious allegory that the storyteller attempts in earnest to convey. My inaccuracies of interpretation, imagination and memory are fed indiscriminately as a research method.
By literalizing the actual experience and texture of play in my work, I structure an uneven and inaccurate (hand-made) internal ordering of the external world. Puppetry, animation and studio work are visual forms of this linguistic process. In using confusions of genre, I agree with Berkeley Art Museum Matrix curator, Dena Beard when she observed that I seek to “transfer the responsibility of storytelling from the narrator to the viewer, exploring the form of “play” as an active exchange.”
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