Performance still - Eating the trophy
Within my art I strive to create work that engages the shared, cultural conscience of the audience, and addresses social issues through image, performance and installation. Cultivating social awareness as well as an individual response from viewers is always an underlying goal of my works.
This piece came to fruition through a Graduate Student Challenge grant for interdisciplinary research. I worked with a team of four other grads to study if there was any relationship between attitudes towards sustainability and fanaticism amongst USF students.
This performance addresses the broad concepts of our research by exploring the fanaticism of individuals and corporations, which we see through the presentation of a redundant and self-serving award by an unnamed corporation. The actual awards presented at this performance were excessive in scale and concept, emphasizing a pattern of self-serving consumption. Sustainability acted as a vehicle for this fanaticism, which is defined in our research as an individual or group who subverts traditional deliberative processes by actively seeking out and suppressing or marginalizing contrary perspectives.
All of the imagery inspiring this performance was taken from google image searches of the words: Fanaticism, Sustainability, and America. The emphasis on black and white is representative of humans' seeming desire for simplicity and duality, which is in direct conflict with the muddled quality of the broad concepts of Fanaticism, Sustainability, and America. The messiness of the chocolate fish (both the one onstage and those in the hands of the audience) contrasts the crisp black and white theme of the evening. The audience dealt with how to clean up the mess in their hands, and how to justify what was occurring onstage. This experience mirrors the difficulty most people have explaining or compromising amongst the central concepts of Fanaticism, Sustainability, and America. It also reflects the muddled survey results, which seemed to indicate that USF students also do not know exactly how they feel about this subject matter.