Artist Statement 2015

“The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought." - Jacques Rancière The Politics of Aesthetics

“[T]his body is responsible for the experience which each of us has of occupying a point in space.” - Kaja Silverman on Valie Export’s film Syntagma

If the world is a play let it have many acts. Allow me to set the scene - it begins with an alternative to gravity, levitation as resistance, intervals of darkness, still and moving images as actors in a conversation, serious-play, and an embodied response. Pay attention to the physical cues of this group thought experiment, use gestic thinking, acknowledge the medium and the channels through which images, sounds, and ideas travel. Think sensorial landscapes other than your own, televisual flows, head spaces, the body produced by the clicking of the camera/gaze — a chance encounter with live[li]ness.

Film and video are the containers I use to house an interdisciplinary practice full of sets, sculptures, scripts, sounds, drawings, photographs, installations, performances, collaborators, and live broadcasts. I use that network of media, and their histories, to document choreographed events that point to the role of the camera as both recording device and catalyst of the event itself. Liveness, as a concept, continues to inspire and confound me.

I am particularly interested in an interplay between mental and physical spaces, how medium and representation alter our understanding of time, space and identity, and modes of communication between gesture and thought. These interests have taken form as single-channel film and video works employing techniques gleaned from dream sequence editing and metaphysical detective novels; multi-channel video works including an eight-channel installation addressing the countdown, kinds of time, and the relationship between liveness and aliveness (havoc and tumbled, 2015); sets including a focus group room (Control Group, 2012), a fictitious publishing company (KC Publications, 2013), and a studio based re-enactment of Lake Mead (Lunar Lake: The Story Behind the Scenery, 2012); a movie reverse-engineered from the description of an unseen film (Local Ads from Faraway Places, 2014) and a video that riffs on the ubiquitous trick in film and television history where the switching of a “practical” light serves as a moment of conspiracy between filmmakers, characters, and audience (In a Perfect Fever, 2015); drawings, props and installations that encourage viewers to analyze their own perceptual frameworks (Untitled Wall Titles, 2011-13) or imagine the scenario that brought that moment into being (Abductive Objects #1-5 series, 2013); a postcard series using stills from videos as manifestations of site and movement (Tracking Shots, 2013, and Encounters #1-40, 2012-13); a proto-cinematic event involving an eighteen foot zoetrope installed in the desert of New Mexico (Wonder Machine: Belen Mirage, 2013); a photo installation documenting a re-enactment of Freud’s consultation room (Conjuring, 2014); live tele-vision performance broadcasts as travelogues to subjective spaces (MUCK MUCK \/ MONICA PANZARINO, 2013, Inside Voices Hollow Objects LIVE, 2013, and Notes for a Vivisection, 2015); and the founding and directing of an artist-made livestreaming tele-vision network (ACRETV.org).