artist’s statement

My artistic practice examines institutionalized art’s complicity with power. The question of complicity, properly considered, requires introspection as well as criticism. My work therefore reflects on our agency, however ambivalent, in processes of institutionalization within the arts community. My work uncomfortably implicates and re-implicates us—artists and arts workers—in our multiple and incompatible roles. I work primarily in exhibition contexts, creating installations using formally arranged traces of the work’s processes of inquiry. The processes I deploy are at first quite open-ended, since they delegate and record engagement with the artwork by the staff who otherwise are assumed to neutrally offset the art. By interpolating gallery staff as active within the scope of the artwork rather than hidden behind it, the otherwise fixed boundaries between art and not-art, or between artist and cultural worker, shift and collapse, re-multiplying our already multiple roles as administrators, entrepreneurs, creative practitioners, spectators, and performers, and recording how decisions to engage or disengage reify or distort the (art)work.
In this way my work assembles modes of reflection on the fine lines between survival, dependency and self-exploitation at play within our ethically-compromised cultural field, and re-questions the decisions we have made that got us to this particularly precarious place. There is urgency for me in reflecting on our complicity not in the past or as a representation, but in the here and now, within the structures that we have built as cultural workers. The contexts I encircle through my work, often those in which it is simultaneously exhibited, are intended to provoke internal reflection and dialogue on the myriad ways we as an arts community have settled into liberal institutionalization; and a hope to provoke our community to find other more liberatory structures less riddled with compromise, and less dependent on our collective and individual expropriation.