Through my arrangement of verbatim texts in performance, poems, & essays, I aim to humanize, to close the distance between fans of TODAY & their beloved anchors, between contemporary patriots & their founding fathers, by peeling back the skin on ingrained relationships to Entertainment. Whatever your aesthetic affinities, it’s my job to expose the horror in the familiar. My current production, #TheFlagWeLove resulted from photographing every flag I saw for one year, at car dealerships, mall food courts, fairs, construction sites, Target. In 2015, I founded Xfinity Theater, a fictional theatre company, as an affront to Comcast’s ubiquity, an appeal to social classes unaware of performance art, & as a comment on the institutionalized branding of avant-garde art. My work drags the dream, the ‘xfinity,’ off the screen and into the room, implicating myself & audiences as coconspirators in the entertainment industrial complex. Artist Mike Kelley says art must “flay the culture,” & while I believe that, I also defend fans of mainstream products, & fight the morally superior judgement of affluent audiences. After performances, audience members have said, “I can’t believe people were laughing at that.” I try to use laughter, the ultimate defense mechanism, as a tool to pry audiences open & attack their vulnerable preconceptions.
