THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

 project is a series of public performances in different locations around Los Angeles. Each performance requires between two and five performers and is documented as a video, which will be its final form. A physical copy of the  LA Times broadsheet with its pictures removed sits between the camera and landscape, dividing up the vista as well as the recorded pictorial image into smaller ‘picture windows’ through which the performers will be visible.

The newspaper chosen for each shoot is dated a year prior to the designated shoot date. 

This project brings together experimental theater, group analysis, and histories of public performance to ask what it means to be part of a collective public in 2023.

Along with a group of performers, I use journalistic news imagery to develop choreographic scores to take place in specific locations across Los Angeles. The performances will be partly improvised, yet the performer’s range of movement will be restricted to areas relative to the placement of the camera. The front page of the LA Times will be embedded within the video image as a formal structure as well as a visual timestamp of the given day of the performance.

Prior to the performances, the group collectively reflects on events from a year prior within the workshop and rehearsal. Here, we collectively interpret the material, insert personal associations, and unstick the images from their purely narrative function.

The structure of the project was developed in response to a lack of public space in contemporary life to grieve the atrocities carried out against our communities and lives alongside the constant feeling of personal failure to fully comprehend the reporting on such events.

THE PLEASURE GROUND

 was exhibited at Cloaca Project in San Fransisco in 2019. The show contains two video installations I conceived in 2018 while on a self-created residency in my hometown (Lancaster, Pennsylvania). 

 (2019) construct viewpoints by way of a fixed configuration between a sculptural element to a single camera. In both video images a disconcerting interplay of figure and ground is produced by the movement of each sculptural device relative to the camera’s position, which turns each in a continuous 360 degree rotation. Before becoming video objects, the images prompt a deconstruction of their viewpoint into a relationship defined by the coexistence of subject, object, and support.


This project directly references the mutual implication of the view and viewer on the level of form created by Richard Serra’s in his film, 

 (1976). I borrowed the spinning bridge/viewfinder as a form through which to reframe the agricultural landscape I’d originally depicted through painting. 

Review: KQED, 'At Cloaca Projects, 'The Pleasure Ground' Turns 'Round Right', by Sara Hotchkiss, Sept 25 2019. 

Review: Journal, 'The Pleasure Ground', by Mattson Fields, 2019.

ANGELS

 is an extended durational performance project exploring the figure and its support structures in Greco-Roman sculpture. 

A series of performances of this type were first presented in a solo show at Shoot the Lobster, Los Angeles in 2017-2018. Subsequent versions of the performance were featured at Cloaca Projects, SF (2018), The ICA, Philadelphia(2019), and the Orange County Museum of Art (2019).  

THE MAN SHED

refers to a small building I made in which to create a series of video portraits of male subjects during my sexual encounters with them. The project is spans 2013-2016 and culminated in my thesis exhibition at the University of California, San Diego titled 

 which took the form of a multi-screen installation of the videos shot there alongside the film set flipped on its back. 

The participating men were solicited through online services used to locate partners for casual sex, like Craigslist and Adam4Adam, as well as through involvement with the The San Diego Fetish Men and the San Diego Gay Pride event. This work represents an ongoing investigation of the alter kinship that springs up within gay male communities and the unexpected conditions in which they flourish.