STATEMENT + CV

STATEMENT

Winter 2020

I’m grateful the juice melts and leaves my fingers numb. It distracts me from the pooling around my body and encourages stillness because even the slightest shift submerges more skin. My affection gets interrupted by shivers. If we don’t have long together I want to take advantage of this moment, to touch while I can. The physical pain will only be temporary so I shouldn’t let go. My body will remember with sudden tears and stiff knuckles when I strip or see the stains but I’m afraid I’ll still forget.

I do painful and intimate performances using domestic objects and pomegranate juice. I substitute flesh and blood for something sticky and sweet to complicate desire and disgust, collapsing moments of pain and comfort into messes of emotional and sensorial ambivalence. I was born in 1994 and am HIV-negative. I don’t know what it’s like to lose someone to AIDS. Performances poorly echo the ‘80s and ‘90s and remind me that it will always be unfamiliar. They reiterate that I am reliant on substitutions and foreign materials like Polaroid photography, beds that are not my own, and skins made of gauze to bridge those temporal and experiential gaps. I have to feel it because my body will remember.