live installation, duration: 3 hours, materials: paint, aluminum, steel, batteries, motors, light, the artist, and sound (‘Aurora’ by Jon Hassell), 2025
How do we cultivate and sustain our energy when it is constantly being drained?
I have turned to books, to gesture drawing, and to the color blue as a way to respond to this question. I decided to translate three texts into gesture drawings and then used those drawings as guides to create twenty-six individual gestures to perform as letters of the alphabet. There was something inherent in these live gestures that helped me find a new energy. Part of this came from experimenting with invented and nonsensical actions to break away from habitual forms of movement to find a new awareness.
The three texts I used were excerpts taken from Luce Irigaray’s “The Way of Love,” Rebecca Solnit’s “A Field Guide to Getting Lost,” and Roland Barthes’s “A Lover’s Discourse.” These excerpts discuss the importance of air in sustaining relationships, the color blue as it relates to longing, and the anxiety that surfaces from an absent lover. These writers’ words have helped me to more fully embrace and cope with paradoxical moments between action and emotion and to shift my thinking to a renewed perspective. Irigaray’s excerpt was translated letter by letter into movement during hour one, Solnit’s excerpt during hour two, and Barthes’s excerpt during hour three.
On Aura is a constantly shifting space where a figure puts things into motion and, in turn, is moved by things. It is a string of movements where his attention bends and shifts in relation to internal and external forces, all in a pursuit to reach a freer version of himself.
On Aura was originally presented at the School of Visual Arts in 2019 as part of the Fertile Ground Performance Series and was then restaged in 2025.