playback
september 2-27, 2003 mark woolley gallery, portland oregon

listen to audio: me and the golliwog (for studio 360)

"i'm fascinated by it all." –– apparently something i say often

playback: regurgitation, revisiting, reworking, and reconceptualizing the every day objects and dialogues of my reality. here is a collection of discoveries, internal and external, offered as a mirror of our world. i draw text from actual sources (web sites, conversations, emails), and items purchased or culled from the web. all of the text is from the last 18 months. the items can be found on the web currently. these experiences and discoveries left me tongue-tied as well as inspired. so i decided to play with it all.

"subjective objectification" is at the heart of most of my work. i am fascinated by creating myself simultaneously as subject and object. i find it empowering to examine my objectified positions in the structure of our society, then reconfigure myself as the subject of art, recreating myself as art-object, and thus re-objectifying myself on my own terms (subjectively). .

the art in playback encourages dialogue without telling you what to think. this varies from my previous show shift: we are not yet done where i deliberately directed the dialogue through images, sound, and text. i am often asked to declare the "statement" behind my work, perhaps in attempt to decide agreement or disagreement with the perceived statement. this becomes less interesting to me. i'd rather an onlooker dialogue with the work and its extended audience. it is my hope that this work serves as a catalyst to conversation that evolves through time and space and leads beyond our current remedial level of dialogue about race in our society. i'm curious to instigate a dialogue that has a growing and developing sophistication, one that explodes the ignorance and erodes the fear we have of looking bluntly at our society, and our part in creating it.

simply put: i make art. process is a peristalsis, and race is one medium with which i find myself engaged.

what was in the show? elements of playback (pdf)

what's a golliwog? about the golligwog (pdf)

what's the artist got to say? playback show statement (pdf)