I am interested in the silent cultural war of attrition we doggedly fight everyday with the fictionally inconsequential. By this I mean that I study the socio-economic conditions and intersubjective norms which converge at the nexus of the cultural production of the individual. My primary collaborator is the culturally conditioned individual. Currently, my research has resulted in the exploration of our collective casual brutality. Our desensitisation to overt violence, political apathy and rampant cynicism has emboldened, if not empowered, myopically radical elements in our society. The works on display today have been selected from the ongoing series entitled Trust in Discomfort 2015-present.
At the core of my artistic practice is the belief that art is a vehicle of progressive social change. This idealism confronts the endemic cynicism within contemporary western culture. For me, the self-generative role we collectively play in our cultural and technological co-evolution inspires a pragmatic hope for the future; a future we all bare responsibility for and witness to. By carefully crafting immersive multi-sensory experiences I playfully confront the participant with the absurd and the macabre, the delicious and the vulgar. The cognitively dissonant exposure to a playful yet brutally absurd experience is intended to affect a choice.
I embed sympathetic incongruencies within the experiences in order to expose simple conditioning mechanisms. The incongruencies of the expected versus the actual can affect transiently dissonant realities which disrupt constructed subject biases. Disrupting these constructed subjective biases reveals the structural mechanisms of the subjective bias. This disruption can then be used as a tool with which the participant can confront their own social conditioning.
The participatory nature of my work dislocates the viewer from normative modes of engagement. The theatrical and performative qualities employed are intended to effuse a sense of risk thereby making the first act of participation a choice with seemingly palpable consequences. This choice in the face of risk inflicts the participant’s experience with an ownership of that experience. This ownership of the experience reinforces the significance and thereby the transformative potential of their choice.
By creating shared sequential experiences in individuated spaces that diffuse into solitary moments within collective environments I seek the simultaneous erasure and collectivization of the individual. This simultaneous erasure and collectivization creates empathetic pathways. The multi-sensory and spatial strategies used are meant to conflate the collective and the individual. In this work, I seek to viscerally embed the participant in a cognitively dissonant experience which asks them to resolve their own place within the psychosocial milieu of disengagement.