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Biography / Artist Statement
I am a multimedia artist, working in video, installation, performance, and new media, with a current focus on media/sound design, production, and curation of performance works for stage. These works center around queer futurity, divas and gay icons, LGBTQ+ histories and mythologies, and tensions between the celebrity image and the physical body. These themes take the form of curatorial projects like ‘TQ Live!’, a multidisciplinary variety performance at the Andy Warhol Museum, presented with Suzie Silver and Joseph Hall, ‘Fail-Safe’, a performance series organized with Angela Washko to present works-in progress in a safe space for failure and audience feedback. Artistic collaborations include ‘I Am a Haunted House’, an improvisational movement and projection work as part of the Kelly Strayhorn’s Freshworks Residency, with dancer Jesse Factor, and ‘The Diva Saga: The Legend of the Worst Drag Queen’, a multi-channel mediated one-woman drag performance, with Veronica Bleus (John Musser). These works are speculative fantasies that share in questioning constructions of sexuality, gender, and identity in a digital age, while peering through portals into other worlds, voids, and vortices.
I gained notoriety working in the Institute for New Feeling, a research clinic founded by myself, Agnes Bolt, and Nina Sarnelle. The Institute exhibited works at MoMA, Ballroom Marfa, Whitechapel Gallery, Black Cube, the Hammer Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, with the mission to create new ways of feeling, and ways of feeling new. These artistic projects were framed as treatments, therapies, retreats, research studies and wellness products, with a critical eye on the health, and beauty industries, as well as concerns with humanity’s digital existence. These works were also positioned between social practice and post internet art movements and aesthetics. Through this collaboration I was able to begin to realize my interest in staging media and movement-based performance works.
I view the trajectory of my career to be based in mergers between artistic creation, curation, and education. As an educator, I advise and teach animation, video, wearable sculpture and performance courses at Carnegie Mellon University, The University of Pittsburgh, the CMU Pre-college program, and have conducted workshops at the Andy Warhol Museum, Mattress Factory, Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School, and Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. I have also previously taught at Youngstown State University and Seton Hill University, and was a founding member of the Media Department at the Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School.
It is important that my teaching and artistic practice overlap by inviting students to engage in performative and media-based public programming, like my class ‘Activated Anamorphs: Performative Inhabitables and Interactive Prostheses’, which has performed at Phipps Conservatory, The Andy Warhol Museum with Jaimie Warren, on Carnegie Mellon Campus with Nick Cave, and in Subsurface: Site Specific Sight and Sound, a music, media, and wearable sculpture performance in Brady’s Bend Limestone Mine, with Jesse Stiles’s ‘Exploded Ensemble’. Another collaboration,‘The Drift’, presented with Steve Gurysh, showcased a series of performances, installations, and public video-mapped screening events along the three rivers of Pittsburgh. These events involved many student and community artists from the Pittsburgh region and beyond, and also partnered with Alisha Wormsly’s Afronaut(a).