Statement


My practice is based on research into the places, spaces and moments where social, political and cultural structures and currents take on visible and tangible forms. I am interested both in documenting how these places and spaces are constructed in the present, and in exploring the shifting private and public narratives through which history is constructed, contested and reconstructed in order to discover or posit similar moments in the past. I am particularly fascinated by border zones, nomanslands, translations, transitions, and the slippages where cultures intersect; security cultures, archives, architectures of democracy, and national imaginaries; places where nature and artifice imitate and influence each other; and cities in conflict and post-conflict conditions.

I work across multiple disciplines - video, installation, photography, text, sound and performance – but all my projects share the same approach to working with narrative, documentary and hybrid modes of storytelling through both linear and interactive database forms. This means that I generally start with a central inquiry - an idea, issue, place, moment or historical narrative - and then accumulate a collection of images, video, audio, objects, texts, or other research materials that cluster around that center. The final project becomes a system for navigating the collection/database. In some cases, I make multiple interfaces to a single project database -- for example, there may be a linear video, a series of photographs, an installation that is interactive or activated by performance, a website, and/or an artist’s book or critical text. Because my research traces both individual narratives and the larger systems or structures that condition or enclose them, I employ rigorous formal structures in much of my work, and particularly in linear videos, where the use of repetition, duration, or rule-based or metric editing serves as a counterbalance or counterpoint to the narrative impulse.

Over the past decade, my work expanded to include public dialogue, public practice, and site-specific, serial, collaborative, interactive, and participatory modes of production. Those initial forays, which included web-based projects and other work within the ambit of new media, developed into two ongoing collaborations. The first is Index of the Disappeared, an archive of post-9/11 disappearances and platform for public dialogue around related issues, maintained since 2004 with visual artist Chitra Ganesh. Through the Index, I have extended my investigations into the roles played by language in defining legal rights; the connections between erasure of data and disappearances in real life; and the differences between warm and cold data. In my own series of ‘warm data’ projects, I have also developed a collective, open-ended storytelling process initiated and mediated by questions and answers -- either by asking certain questions of the individuals and groups I engage or the audiences who encounter the work, or by offering myself as a performer to answer their questions. These personal interactions and intimate interventions are also often designed to create smaller and more specific dialogues within the context of a larger and more abstract debate.

The second ongoing collaboration is a series of videos and multimedia performances made since 2006 with choreographer Erin Ellen Kelly. Together we develop and film performances specific to both site and camera through a research process influenced by the contextual school of landscape archaeology, and then situate those performances within larger visual, aural and temporal compositions to create more complex meditations on place, history, culture and memory. During the last year we have also been experimenting with re-translating these performances for video into live performances that incorporate elements of the videos, as part of an inquiry into how time is experienced or represented differently in live and recorded performances, and what happens when the same performers are simultaneously present as bodies and/on screens.