Bleach or (The Art of Subtraction) emerged from my anxiety over the ephemerality of performance art. As an artist seeking stability, I grapple with the challenge of documenting live performance in a medium resistant to traditional representation. My inclination toward performance art originated in high school, influenced by a penchant for absurdist stuntwork. This inclination persisted and evolved at Sarah Lawrence College, providing valuable insights into institutional negotiation and productive delinquency.
The project began as a performance during which I spat bleach onto a T-shirt, creating a wearable and commodifiable token to spark dialogue and trigger recollection of the performance. Through documentation, propaganda, and the artist's cult of personality, I interrogate how artists, often white cisgender men, succeed and establish heroism through mechanisms of discomfort, excitement, and simulated risk. The objects I create, ranging from photographs to large canvases and wearable pieces, challenge traditional notions of painting and art. Like cult propaganda, they offer incomplete representations, providing curated glimpses. I utilize bleach to create a subtractive form of painting akin to reductive charcoal drawing and photographic processes, and I additionally seek to question whether simulated risk and safety precautions are the logical end aesthetic to process art and abstract expressionist action painting.
The work follows my iteration on the form with mounting scale and stakes, adhering to an approximately episodic structure that includes a genesis episode, in which the artist’s craving for this specific form of attention and following originates in a maternal relationship but is also present in a romantic one.
I would like to thank my family, friends, mentors, and my director of photography Rachel Pearson. I would also like to thank Eliya Brennan, who authored and performed a number of these pieces with me and whose contributions to my life and work are beyond measure.
