SHIFT MEMORY is a performative dance piece that explores the cumulative and contextual aspects of proprioceptive memory. A large portion of my work as a speech language pathologist has focused on children with sensory integration disorders. These children often seek proprioceptive input in order to feel their bodies in space. More than likely you've experienced deep pressure proprioceptive stimulation while swimming underwater.

SHIFT MEMORY engages the audience as active agents in a process that disrupts normative sensory input. Using industrial wind fans, the performers manipulate pressurized air to push voluminous sheets of parachute fabric (each 15’ high x 30’ long) into continually shape-shifting walls, caverns, and tunnels. The audience/ participants push against/resist/ move with the pressurized air through the shifting, voluminous shapes that guide them through continuously dividing and expanding cavernous spaces. The participants come away from the performance with a heightened sense of proprioceptive input and a greater perception/understanding of their bodies moving through space.

THE PEEP SHOW

THE PEEP SHOW engages the voyeuristic relationship we have with female imagery and trains our eyes toward the promise of seduction and the forbidden. With a nod to Duchamp’s dark and intriguing assemblage Étant donnés and the dismembered and deconstructed part-objects of Louise Bourgeois’ sculptures, The Peep Show reflects upon organs, organisms, organizations, organelles.

Five small theater maquettes, constructed from corn starch boxes, are designed so that the observer can only see the enclosed objects/ videos by purposefully looking through small holes. In The Peep Show, the viewer’s physical self is pressed into a realm of unease by alternating images of chaos and the sublime. Combining videos of frenzied insects feeding on a hidden carcass, with obsessive stimming on ribbons, zippers, hand movements, and the repetitive stabbing of a knife through running water, the installation develops a language of desire, obsession, fear, and disgust.

Revealed are images of entropy, gesticulating motions, nature decomposing, and flashes of color, as a female voice reads aloud words from the Oxford English Dictionary that begin with the word “organ”.

(in the works)

An ongoing and ever expanding film consisting of film clips of images of women taken from films dating from 1888 (Roundhay Garden Scene) to the present.