1000 Steps

2020

My current practice focuses heavily on my ten-year catalogue of dreams, exploring the relationship between trauma, memory, and the body, building on past work and my ongoing interests in social systems and embodiment. I’m interested in the transformative potential in realizing my dreams, and the affective power of bringing something to life that once existed only as a memory of itself. It is an experiment in awe and wonder grounded in cynical acknowledgement of the possible. For me, the art lies in unpacking how I might be changed through this process, and how that might change my world.

1000 steps is a stream-of-consciousness performance drawing from concrete images within one specific dream. This is that dream: 

I dreamed I traveled to a performance festival to make a performance about walking 1000 steps, but it was really more about everyday life. During my performances, I mostly sat and had conversations with festival attendees, but sometimes I’d get on the treadmill they’d brought in specially for my performance. I was unsure of how it was going, and though it was supposed to be over once I’d walked a thousand steps, I knew I’d already walked tens of times more steps than that but was reluctant for it to be over because it didn’t yet feel resolved. The festival organizers and audiences seemed to think it was brilliant, but I was unsure. Mikiki was also performing at this festival, and we were both staying in Air BnBs in a large apartment building near the festival site. Andy was there but he spent a lot of time wandering around the city on his own when he wasn’t hanging out with Mikiki and I. While walking in the park one day, a friend and I witnessed a horrific crime in which a gang of bikers jumped a couple of women walking by and tried to beat them up. We intervened, even though we were in danger of being beaten ourselves. Luckily several other people came to our defense as well and the bikers backed off. The women had no idea why they’d been singled out and neither did we; the city’s inhabitants felt much less safe in the park after that, and I decided to complete my performance on the festival site rather than wandering through the unfamiliar city. Running concurrently with the festival was a fetish marathon; there were constantly hundreds of tall thin people in full body rubbersuits running around the city and especially around the apartment building we were staying in. During off hours, Mikiki and Andy and I would stand on the balcony and watch people run by; some had pig masks, some had dog masks, some had gas masks, and many had full coverage hoods. Mikiki often recognized people in the race and would run downstairs to greet them as they ran by; they always stopped, super excited to see him, and shared a joke and a warm embrace before continuing on. One time, Mikiki recognized a rubber couple who were getting married during the marathon, and they were so excited to see him that they stopped for an impromptu photo shoot in which Mikiki posed lewdly with one of the members of the wedding party. Mikiki and I spent lots of time alone in my apartment and his snooping through the belongings, scrounging for food, making peanutbutter toast and fabulous meals out of odds and ends, eating slabs of dark chocolate while he talked about his therapy and had me listen to the lengthy phone messages he’d left for his therapist, laugh-crying the whole time. I was sad when the end of the festival drew near, as I didn’t want to say goodbye.