STATEMENT OF WORK

My work is interdisciplinary and time-based, engaging with video, photography, performance, and social practice to collaborate with human service sectors in anti-poverty support, public health, and care work. My recent work approaches poverty and class division with feminist care ethics, asking for deeper conversations about autonomy, power dynamics, and voicelessness within social service agencies and care institutions. My video and performance art practice investigates these sectors through expanded documentary, exploring topics such as secondary trauma and the cost of care on workers though interviews and image exploration.

Although my work focuses on gaps that are unaddressed by narrow dominant cultural values and works parallel to social service provision, it does not seek to ‘fix’ social problems. I view social practice as holding space for dissidence, gray areas, contradiction, and alchemy. My background in performance art influences my approach to social practice. Accordingly, my work is often process and praxis-based and I consider my primary audience to be those who are physically present throughout the project as participants and co-creators. As an artist, I see my role as creating structures for participative experiences that draw attention to the possibility of intimacy in public life and the affects of systems on relationships. Ultimately, I aim to re-envision and peel open complexities about who and what we value as a society.

By exploring the convergence of aesthetics in both life and art, my work positions aesthetics away from easy discussions of form and instead posits it as the very space where social and art practices encounter each other. I am especially interested in non- essential qualities of art within social justice contexts because ephemeral and temporary interventions into systemic problems are often overlooked, and sometimes the most meaning, and most meaningful change, exists in the day-to-day, the temporary, the non-essential, the seemingly unimportant details.