(HD video, performance), 2013:

The term, occupation, contains within its varied but related definitions certain assumptions about time and space. Perhaps the most often used definition refers to how one spends time, as in some activity in which a person engages. This can be a hobby such as the continued or repeated acts of painting, swimming, bird-watching, or stamp-collection. Obviously, it might also refer to one’s work, or one’s job. This is, perhaps, the primary activity that one passes time doing.

As mentioned, it also has spatial connotations. In particular, when one refers to a military occupation, the implication is of an act or process of taking possession of a place or area that had previously been under the control of another force; however, even the previous sense of occupations suggest a space or a place. Activities, even the “act” of living, requires the use of a particular place: a place for painting, a space for cooking, the location of one’s job.

home occupation, 2013
domestic performance, video documentation

 

The video above is an excerpt of a 12-hour performance in my small studio apartment that I occupy with my partner.

Using a GPS locator on my mobile telephone, I concentrate on the seemingly random movements that it displays on the map as a way to designate my position in space. Interestingly, even while I am stationary in my apartment, the constant triangulation of the locator that refreshes itself in a given interval, depicts me as in constant motion. Following those movements onscreen, I reposition my body accordingly. In essence, I am mapping with my body the very software and hardware, the machinery, the satellites and antennas which work together to locate and position that body. I map the technology which ostensibly is mapping me.

It is thus an existential consideration of what it means to be, to exist in space and time, particularly in a presumably private domestic space at a time when governmental and corporate surveillance of movements, habits, and communications is ubiquitous.

object occupation, 2013
video performance and/or documentation

 

The series of clips above document an ongoing exploration of the occupation of space, in terms of physical activity, of asserting possession, and forming identity. As such, I explore the relationship between my body and mass-produced domestic objects – containers of various sorts of spaces both 2 and 3-dimensional – and especially the camera. Shot on the sidewalks of the Chelsea gallery district, I also wish to look at the interaction of art and the quotidian object, of the gallery system and the domestic sphere, of the galleries themselves and previously peripheral areas of the city. In part, it is an attempt to insert humor into unexpected places.

cube occupation, 2013
performance documentation

For this piece I created a red-felt cube 5′ X 5′ X 5′. There are slots for 4 heads, 4 pairs of arms, and 4 pairs of feet in each corner for bodies to provide the structure for the cube, or to provide mobility if desired.

There are also 4 flaps to allow entry into the cube to onlookers or passers-by, as well as an additional slot for a head to push through the center of the top panel. The ‘viewer’ may choose simply to occupy the space ‘inside’ or participate with those holding up the cube by becoming part of its structure in the center and moving her/his head ‘outside’ through the slot.

The ‘viewer’ thus becomes part of the cube, a double object of the subjectivity of other viewers outside the cube as well as the other 4 structural bodies in the corners. The cube may be a sculpture, a performance, a place for conversation, a hide-out, a spectacle to be wondered about or photographed, or some strange garment.