gig

When I was conceptualizing this project I was still thinking of transitions, but whereas with the first project I focused on movement as a way through grief, here I was looking at a stage of transition wherein you’ve arrived at some tangible notion.

For me this came slowly and not without much suffering. But once I was in a space that felt less chaotic and less riddled with anxiety, once I had full days of calm, certain notions that had yet to occur to me, occurred.

Namely, those of dichotomy and false dichotomy. Half and half verses the embodying of both or multiple. We are all socialized to see things in black and white, or gendered, or right or wrong. Most of us are not taught that that concept of situational ethics exists, nor that one can embody two contradicting notions at once. But we all do this. We all embody the saint and the monster, the virgin and the whore etc…all of the time. I really like Paula’s use of Susan Stryker’s idea that embracing the monster in us can be a powerful tool. I spent so much time thinking that I was one thing and that the person who hurt me was another. In actuality we are all everything all at once.

So with the project I wanted to show what appears to be two halves of an experience. The first poem I wrote in 2006 about my partner. The second I finished three years later. Upon first listen they appear to be separated by a vast space, an unbridgeable gap. One is light and teeming with love, the other dark and full of suffering. But they are connected. I used the maze because it often feels as though you have to maneuver through something as complex and convoluted as that maze to see the connection inherent in things. The colored images represent a spectrum of emotion and movement through said emotions, but not necessarily reflective of a proscribed continuity. At any moment it is possible to cease movement or move backwards and then again forward at any number of paces. Throughout this course I have been thinking a lot of the transgressive nature that one’s actions may have. One’s ability to pass over or go beyond a limit or boundary, etc…To this end I used my body as a canvas in which images appeared to flash over, on and through me as commentary on the permeability of boundaries that often seem impossible or impenetrable.

The mask exists as a way to tie my first two projects together. The boundary between the different states of being that I have explored is an ambiguous borderland that complicates the strict opposition between love and loss. But just as we saw with Alex’s first project, the mask can operate as a symbol of the lost or unsure, but it can also act as a safe space in which one can explore or work through the construction of new identities.