Description:
This performance is based on a dream that I transcribed into sculptural actions and spoken word. An early version of the piece was performed in Feb 2022 at Okno1/Lost in America gallery in Tulsa, OK with Suzanne Kite and Robbie Wing. The dream was filled with surrealist imagery about the oil/gas industry and geographies in the United States - tracking from LA to the midwest, and ultimately the east coast. Major themes in the project explore non-human animal kinships (scarabs/porcupines) and the tension between a spiritual vs. industrial relationship to the land.
Music: Kite + Robbie Wing
Choreography: Jonathan Durham, Kite, Robbie Wing
Live Sound Engineer: Robbie Wing
Just Make Cookies takes as its point of departure a 2017 incident in which a north Tulsa Community was told by the nearby Holly Refinery to “just bake cookies” in their homes to hide the smell of noxious gases being vented from the crude oil facility. This performance attempts to enact a response to that corporate absurdity.
Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn Alabama
-|- Dance -|- Strategic Air Command is a multi-part installation of video projections and an overturned, stripped-down helicopter cockpit outfitted with a green disco laser. The laser pulses inside the cockpit to the beat of the music in the projections - a compilation of concert, dance club and infrared police helicopter footage. When archiving the club videos I searched for instances when the intensity of the dance lasers etched or corrupted the CCD chip of the cameras, causing an entire line or cross section of pixels to be lost in the footage. The lost cross sections of visual information in the club scenes echo the cross hairs present in all the police footage, connecting each of these locations to the deliberate act of targeting and potential for escalating violence.
footage of oil well bore hole inspections, arthroscopic joint surgery and FLIR video used to detect VOCs