...as a Self-Portrait

Artist Statement, the Me, Me, Me show:

For the Me, Me, Me… show at Orleans Street Gallery, I am presenting my series of Silver Tickets for the first time. I also have the chance to consider the act of making a “good first impression” with a performance during the opening reception.

The Silver Tickets mark a year of research into precious metals and ideas of valuation and are my first self-conception a performer who is conscious of both my economic/financial context as well as my aesthetic context. The tickets themselves are a solid product with material value produced by a performer who usually creates disposable and transitory arrangements of objects in the context of a temporary show.

Considered as a self-portrait, the tickets are interesting to me as something that are two-faced, as an object with a face and reverse but also featuring a Janus-faced portrait of my profile, wearing an animal mask on the back of my head, stamped into the metal. This two-facedness connects to the archetypical theater image of the paired happy/sad, drama and comedy masks as well as notions of looking inward and looking out, self-perception vs. public-perception, and an animalist/emotional nature paired with a rational/human nature.

The fingerprints on the reverse are a rather banal icon of identity suggesting a presence and also time, as the presence is past and all that remains is residue. Even as I have chosen to invest time and resources in the process of creating these objects I still find myself firmly interested relatively immaterial experience of performance which is difficult to measure, value and place within an economy. With that said, these tickets are also a prop which marks and supports an economically measurable presence as a performance artist in the world as the Silver Tickets have measurable material values if nothing else.

Faces and masks both hide and reveal, and can be both an entrance into a person and a barrier. The ticket’s text invites the owner into a relationship with me by initially serving as material link to my website and by offering discounted access to future ticketed performances. The performance I present for the opening reception expands on the potential of the ticket as a link and entrance into my ideas and work. The self-portrait of the performance is first encountered visually at a distance, invites a meeting and then participation. The audience is then offered an opportunity to create a moment of shared identity that while fleeting is rooted in the link created by holding the Silver Ticket together.

This paired experience of performance and object is reiterated for Silver Ticket buyers who receive an owner’s manual that features instructions for creating a performance at home.