Imaging trespass

My sculptures, performances, and photographs investigate issues surrounding landscape and ownership in late-stage capitalism. The investigation functions through acts of trespass -- recontextualizing trespass as an act of refusal -- a method to push against and forge space within systems that oppress, segment, compartmentalize, and monetize in order to control. In this context, trespass is wielded as a tool to remake the whole, a method of claiming and reclaiming land, body, and time -- a mending of the commons. At the same time, each trespass is also an assertion of individual privilege -- an expression of safety and power that imposes an individual perspective onto an other. These concurrent realities create a fundamental paradox -- while each trespass challenges the paradigm of ownership and control, it risks reinforcing the very dynamic it intends to critique. The challenge for me as an artist is to use an awareness of this distortion on the personal level to point to the distortion of the larger system, allowing the simultaneity to become a lens through which both can be witnessed and understood.

What follows is a narrative that traces my recent process of making -- from the initial moment of tension/reaction that catalyzes my engagement with a site, to the process of internalizing and contextualizing that critique to understand the limitations of my own perspective, to the ultimate translation into material -- how the context and content is translated back into form and presented to the viewer.