artfulness in process
I am a visual artist, cultural producer, and have exhibited, lectured and held residencies in Canada and abroad.
I hold an MFA in Intermedia, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities, both from Concordia University in Montréal. My doctoral dissertation, “Goodnight Moon: Master-piece, Identity, and the Shimmer” was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Joseph R. Bombardier doctoral scholarship.
In both art and study, I am interested in how the edging of experience — the “artful” — is linked to the creative force of desire, and the production of subjectivity. In examples that range from the quotidian to the performative, I look at processes, objects, and techniques that carry the potential to produce alter-socialities in the neighbourhood of minoritarian sexual expression: a fulsome experience of ‘life’ at the edges of experience. “Life,” according to Brian Massumi, “is not an in-itself, it’s an outdoing-itself. In other words, it follows a tendency to exceed already-realized potential in an actualization of new potential” (Massumi 2015, 184).
What is a queer aesthetic practice? How do artfulness and queerness encounter one another? What is that predisposition to a certain aesthetic sensibility — always at risk of being reterritorialized — that marks the alter-social formation of queerness? Perhaps, we can start to think of queer aesthetics as a mode of life. In explorations ranging from the relationship between process philosophy, Gertrude Stein, and the children’s book Goodnight Moon; to anti-oedipal gay liberationist movements of the 1970s; to the role of gesture and materiality produce subjectivity in performance and sex… I’m moved to think and make around worlding events (in germ) which populate our everyday.
I am a founding member of the Curatorial Research-Creation Collective, which asks what curation as research-creation can do; and a member of the Senselab/3ecologies project.
From 2020-2024 I was a principle research assistant at the Dramaturgical Ecologies project, led by P.I. Angélique Willkie, which studies the encounter between black studies and dance dramaturgy. For five years, I taught in the Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality program at Concordia University. In 2019-2020 I was a Concordia University Public Scholar.