The Withers
2018
2018
Starring: Jackie Nelson, the horse trainer,
Featuring: The Meeker Park Lodge horses, Sidney Love Coles, the baby, and Katie Coles, the mother
Mountains 2
2022
A soap-operatic, transapocalyptic play about learning how to live while preparing to die. A post-normative post-species love-fest blurring fact & fantasy, art & therapy.
Mountains 2 premiered at Torn Space Theater, Buffalo NY, 2/11/2022
2022
Trailer
Full Performance
Deep Fake
Deep Fake is a series of paintings I began working on in 2019, based on the study of color theory and historically sacred relationships to form and color. The paintings in Deep Fake reference the notion of “fake depth”, named after the term Deepfakes (a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake”) which refers to synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else’s likeness. The Deep Fake paintings are created with solid opaque fields of color that based on the principles of color theory, in proximity to one another suggest the illusion of depth and overlap. I use gouache and mineral paint for their ultra matte quality to create surfaces that maximally absorb rather than reflect light.
2022
2022
2021
The House On Fire Show is an experimental youth climate drama produced by artist Kyla Kegler in collaboration with the WNY Youth Climate Council, artist Lindsey Griffith & over 40 young climate justice activists and artists from across the USA.
Over the course of three episodes, the House On Fire show tells the story of three communities in three cities— Buffalo, Los Angeles and Louisville, and how they are entangled both personally and with regards to intersectional climate justice work.
This fictional drama based on real lives, real information and real legislation (namely the Climate and Community Investment Act) aims to entertain and educate its audiences on the language of climate justice, in order to give everyone the tools to participate in these essential conversations.
Episodes aired at 8pm Eastern Time on June 19th, June 26th and July 10th, 2021 on the internet and live-screened outside at Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (BICA).
This project was generously supported by ASI WNY Global Warming Art Grant, ASI WNY Community Art DEC Grant, Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center’s Equipment Access Award, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Just Buffalo Literary Center, the Lexington Coop, and BICA. BIG thank you to our sponsors for making this show possible!
Episode 1: Pain
Episode 2: Protest
Episode 3: Power
Mountains
2020
2020, Artpark, WNY in the context of PLAY/GROUND art festival
Mountains is a performance that features a live director / puppeteer (played by me), and a cast of 10 inter-species creatures performed by volunteers with varying degrees of performing experience (ranging from none to professional). The creatures (who I refer to as the puppets) are defined by their full-head masks, made by me from paper mache. The show centers around a fictional drama featuring performers masquerading as animals and inter-species creatures, who are each an archetype (or several) of struggle. The characters were built around conversations I had with each performer about what they were currently struggling with (at the time Covid19 was only a few months old).
Mountains was performed twice back to back, a matinee and an evening show. This video is from the evening performance.
2020
mountains
In the weeks leading up to this performance, an invitation was extended to the public to make their own paper mache creature heads and perform in the Mountains Movement Choir. The following instructional videos were circulated.
video tutorial
5 MIN MASK MAKING TUTORIAL
2020
It’s You I Like is a live Zoom miniseries named and loosely structured after the children's TV show Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. The show was made in 2020 during the first spring of the Covid 19 pandemic.
The content is based on conversations with five artists in five cities (Los Angeles California, Pecos Texas, Buffalo NY, Berlin Germany, Munich Germany), who play fictional versions of themselves, searching for connection, hope and purpose during socially distant, transapocalyptic times.
It’s You I Like is scripted, minimally rehearsed fiction, based on the real thoughts, feelings and circumstances of the featured artists.
Episode 1: Home
Episode 2: Relatinoships
Episode 3: Work
Life In Five Seasons
2019
Life in Five Seasons was staged as a durational performance installation unfolding in five scenes over the course of 6 hours at PLAY/GROUND WNY 2019, Medina, NY.
The performance features a live director / puppeteer (played by me), and a rotating cohort of 15 inter-species creatures performed by a cast of volunteers with varying degrees of performing experience (ranging from none to professional). The creatures (who I refer to as the puppets) are defined by their full-head masks, made by me from paper mache. The five scenes of this work correspond to the five stages of life and seasons:
Scene 1: Spring / Conception / Birth / Infancy / Orgy / Euphoria / Garden of Eden / Land of Oz / Midsummer Night's Dream / Introduction / ETC.
Scene 2: Summer / Childhood / Innocence / Play / Power / Bullying / Fantasy / Emulation / Attention-Approval Seeking / Homework / Pied Piper
Scene 3: Fall / Adolescence / Broody / Melodramatic / War / Vanity / Transition / Courtship / Identity / Fantasy
Scene 4: FINTER (Fall-Winter) / Early-Middle Adulthood / Working Times / Assembly Line / Productivity / Repetition / Work-place Affairs / Efficiency / Purpose / Anticlimactic
Scene 5: Winter / Adulthood-Old Age-Death / Peace / Love / Wise / Kind / Amnesia / Responsible / Grumpy / Painful / Broken / Nostalgia / Reality
This performance was never rehearsed. Each scene was performed several times in a row until I felt like it successfully landed, and then we moved on to the next scene. The audience was free to come and go from the installation.
2019
Scene 1: Spring / conception
Scene 2: Summer / childhood
Scene 3: fall / adolescence
scene 4: finter / early-middle adulthood
scene 5: winter / old-age / death
bonus scene: cleanup
Greenhouse, Apocalypse
2019
Garden Art Walk exhibition, curated by John Santomieri, Hotel Henry, Buffalo, NY
2019
Greenhouse, Apocalypse is a choreographic lecture-performance made in collaboration with choreographer Allison Peacock, based on her Rock Dance research (inspired by a special boulder that sits outside her studio window). It was created for the Garden Art Walk exhibition, curated by John Santomieri at Hotel Henry, 2019.
Over the course of one week, we met via zoom to chat about Allison’s research and her experience of personal growth. I recorded and edited these conversations into the video layer of Greenhouse, Apocalypse, and then staged myself and two other dancers— Jonas Maria Droste and Lydia Kegler, inside the white, translucent cubic tent, performing Allison’s Rock Choreography. Two videos played on two different screens in front of the tent: on the left Allison was zoomed into the performance live, performing the choreographies with us from her apartment in Montreal, and on the right was the video I made combining found footage sourced from the internet and videos taken on my phone with excerpts from our development zoom meetings.
trailer
two minute excerpt
full performance
Geometric Relative Color
All works:
Mineral paint and Gouache on stretched canvas
48" x 48"
2022
2021
Feel Me in the Library
2018
Feel me in the Library, Vogt Gallery in the Canisius College Library, 2019
Feel Me in the Library is a site-specific installation of my interactive sculpture Compression Therapy, made for the glass cube gallery inside of the Canisius College library. This work came after my work Feel Me, a project about the commodification of feeling looking at ways of decolonizing it. Feel Me in the Library emerged from an investigation into early memories of feeling comfort, safety and satisfaction. Memories of the the desire to have weight on my body as a child — the pleasurable feelings of having my blood pressure taken, the led X-ray vest at the dentist office, buried in sand, under couch cushions, or the bodies of my siblings, inspired this work.
2019
Feel Me
2018
Feel Me:
How to dwell in daily sensation
SELF PUBLISHED
Feel Me, Box Gallery, Buffalo, NY 2018
2018
Feel Me was my MFA Thesis project at the University at Buffalo, 2018. The research was a reaction to a life/work context shift, relocating from Berlin (where I had lived fro 8 years, working as a yoga instructor and making art in the context of the contemporary dance scene) to my hometown, Buffalo, NY, where I returned to in 2016 to complete the MFA in studio art. In this move I was confronted with an extreme lifestyle and artistic discourse adjustment from one in which the somatic experience was considered and privileged, to one in which the cognitive experience was of primary concern. The work also stems from my conflicted involvement with the mindfulness industry as a yoga teacher.
Feel Me considers the alienation from intuitive somatic knowledge resulting in the commodification of feeling (by the mindfulness industry), and looks at experimental ways of decolonizing and recovering feeling. The work emerged from an investigation into early memories of hyper-sensing, and feeling comfort, safety and satisfaction. Memories of the the desire to have weight on my body as a child — the pleasurable feelings of having my blood pressure taken, the led X-ray vest at the dentist office, buried in sand, under couch cushions, or the bodies of my siblings, inspired this work.