My projects are scientific social experiments. My art is an investigative process that seeks to question and challenge the way people interact. Inherent in most human interactions are power dynamics and predetermined roles that typically control social exchanges. My art draws attention to these roles, while seeking to find a social space outside of these roles to create new, more egalitarian ways for people to exchange.
fifteen minutes is an interactive web-based performance, wherein people submit an activity for me to do for fifteen minutes, I video tape myself doing the activity and post all videos online. When a person watches television it is assumed that their role is passive. However there is a meaningful power exchange between the viewer and the person or object being watched. By allowing the viewer to demand the content of their media, fifteen minutes not only makes this subtle power exchange apparent, but unavoidable. Viewers must negotiate their desires with this live person (me) that they are putting those desires on. It is that negotiation that empowers both the viewer and the performer to move beyond their prescribed roles.
My art projects challenges social boundaries in two main areas. The first area is participants' relationship to me, as the artist, and deals with issues of gender, the body, intimacy and sexuality. The second area is participants' relationships to each other and society and raises issues of politics, community and efficacy. By challenging social boundaries the projects affect participant's relationship to power in two ways. First, it raises people's awareness of how power functions and impacts their lives. Second, the work empowers participants by giving them specific instances of efficacy.
For the project "New Outfits" workshop participants created cloaks that redressed five monuments in Baltimore's historic Mount Vernon Place Park. Monuments are static symbols of power and history. The project rearranged the symbolic hierarchies of the statues, giving people access to the power that the monuments represent. A group of high school students made a cloak for Roger B Taney (the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision). Mr Taney wore the students' interrogative questions, such as "Why are black people property?". The project gave these students the efficacy to talk back to a history that has determined many aspects of their lives.
By involving the participant in the process of reaching the project goals, my art builds the capacity of participants to think critically, challenge power structures, collaborate, and create.
The Boundary Block Party is an annual event to bring together three neighborhoods in West Baltimore. The neighborhoods differ in race, class and culture, but share their locations and borders. The block party is collaboratively planned by a team of people from all the neighborhoods. By drawing on and connecting community resources, the process of creating the block party builds the capacity for West Baltimore to work together to build community.
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