I’ve been a working artist, curator, community activist and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. My practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. I’ve operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. I’m forever inspired by the rebel queers, renegade witches, and other dyke moms I run with, and bound to many brilliant artists, activists, spell-casters and healers. For many years I made performances that drew from my own experiences of trauma and transformation, intimacy and motherhood. More recently, I’ve experienced a shift in my practice, where my attention has turned to wider theoretical questions about the nature of performance itself to ask questions about when, where, how we perform - in theatres and galleries, on social media, and in our everyday lives.
My practice generally incorporates quotidian and discarded materials with painting, drawing and photography. I work across a variety of media as needed. My projects frequently intersect social justice and environmental issues using materials which bear histories of taste and accumulations of labour. These include illegal milk from community supported agriculture, linoleum from demolished Vancouver real estate, used t-shirts, old mattresses, yarn, spray-paint, and art-world form letters. I seek to connect viewers to ascribed hierarchies of value through the use of various socio-historically laden materials.
Discomfort with the nexus of art, power, and knowledge leaves me keen to undermine art as a sphere remote from those without the requisite privileges for access. My artwork often displays concern with its own assumption of cultural value. As a prestigious realm of knowledge and culture, I see art functioning in part to legitimate and perpetuate uneven distributions of cultural power and authority. I am especially interested in the gender dimension to these politics.
My work often registers the potential for critical autonomy outside the realm of elite art. Here I investigate how leisurely modes of insight outside bourgeois categories of competence, and value may harbour disalienating potential through a general will to knowledge, self-representation, and creativity. I strive to nuance my considerations rather than reassert a dichotomy between high and the low taste. Many of my projects extend the notion of art as an everyday category of experience and popular practice in radical disalignment with consumer culture. I often re-valuate media in order to highlight certain quotidian experiences and practices as potential sites of consciousness-raising, if only as a reconfiguration of unwanted material bearing the broken utopian promise of the commodity.