ARTIST STATEMENT

 

         As an interdisciplinary Artist, I create by blending humor with a circus flair for the sacred. My Art navigates the truths society resists, pulling at the collective colonial mask. Using the confluence of musical language and movement, I constantly question expressed humanity in any situation as a means of striving for transcultural connection. My aims are at evoking compassion and inclusion diminishing isolation – the plague of our time.

            Those things considered fractured and other make me curious. I believe in the healing power of Art, not only for myself but also for those who experience it. Making Art is the only way I know how to make sense of existence while creating community. Art is how I communicate across cultures. In the silence is where I hope we all meet.

            As a mixed blood two-spirit of Creek/Cherokee descent, I am constantly peeling back social norms. Everything I create is then a mosaic of my own identities and those of my collaborators – both professionally and those in community. My theatrical work collaboratively attempts to deflate the shame that prevents any one of us from being expansive, giving rise for the voiceless to let their voice sing. By removing one training wheel at a time, one mask at a time, this is echoed in my broken tile mosaic work - both created by large groups on large walls for public consumption as well as distilled on a vulnerable piece of plywood in privacy. The broken mirror shards reflect how I teach performance by finding truth in the intersectionality of identity in our fractured hybrid reality. We find a way to transform where they dance together. Then we laugh.