Landing on the right words to describe my artistic practice feels like a practice itself of catch and release. I’ll start here - I adore gesture.
My practice stems from my explorations of gesture. But similar to trying to find the right words, trying to understand how I understand gestures is more poetic than conclusive. We don’t have an ordinary definition of this ordinary word, and it is perhaps that circumstance that I adore. Most of our purposeful actions
in interpersonal spaces are through gesture; understanding gesture is understanding ourselves.
And while I long to articulate the sophistication of gesture as its own language of the moving body - a gulf of unnamable depth - a motion that breaks the deceit of linear time and space - I simultaneously wish to meet gestures in unremarkable places like train stops and kitchen sinks and let them remain ineffable.
I don’t propose I’ll understand how we understand gesture, or even find a tolerable definition. I feel more like a cartographer of the effects of gesture - mapping a web of inner dialogue spun in response
to a facial expression or hearing the bing of an incoming text message. Perhaps if we had a map, we could begin to chart the unknown territories of living in contradiction and ambiguity. We could begin to feel familiar in the multitude of truths that stem from a swift glance and half smile.
Though my research into gesture takes many forms, it is often performative in nature. I shape performances around the kind of experience I want a viewer to have, while leaving openings for agency and response. Working this way has allowed me to engage with elements like temporality, risk, and fragility. Something about that makes me feel like everyone involved is invited into the gesture of searching.
In a long term project I called The Gesture of Searching, I explored a number of gestures: speaking, writing, telephoning, loving, and searching. For five consecutive days, participants called a phone number to listen
to a daily voice message from me, prompting them to respond either in action or voiced reply. Each message was a prompt I wrote in collaboration with a text by Vilem Flusser called Gestures. I recorded each message as a performer, and as each participant called in to listen, they too inextricably became a performer. We were both listening to the other, only to be left in our own bodies, holding a phone to our ear.
As I continue to work with gesture, my research points me to themes of freedom. This word is also difficult to define when it stands alone, but I’m interested in putting into the context of the gesture of searching. In a time when the internal and external gestures are blurred, selfcare is our new god, and imagining worlds has entered our zeitgeist - how are we defining ourselves within bodies? How are we defining freedom? I’m not convinced we can do so without each other. My freedom is bound by our togetherness.
Before I skip too far ahead in my search, I believe I am in dire need of reminders that I am my body - not temporarily inisde one. I am my body. We are our bodies, Together.