artist statement
Sound and music are major elements of my work. Rather than functioning secondarily to the visual, sound acts as a sort of substitute language—articulating unexpressed motivations and repressed desires. The recorded voice—displaced, manipulated, and, often, re-embodied—is the way that the emotional states of my characters reveal themselves. I enact a “remix,” a re-thinking of identity and position which destabilizes more codified forms of communication. In my work, sound editing processes often work in surprising and unexpected ways to — at once— question and solidify relationships between the simulacral and the real.
I explore how cultural products and lived experience influence each other in order to perpetuate hegemonic social structures. Questions that drive me include: How is daily social experience scripted? What is the line between fictional products and cultural myths? By reenacting seminal figures from film, television, and new media in an autobiographical context, my work seeks to unburden sources from the confines of their original placements. Through bifurcation and distancing, I engineer uncanny situations in which normative cultural tropes and scenarios break down and reveal themselves as fabrications. In a sense, they become simulacra—designed to enforce rigid codes of performativity. My practice strives to expose how even our most intimate emotional interactions are deeply informed by scripted scenarios pointing to subtle power structures embedded within the social fabric.