The following addresses  A Reeducation, and Utopians Dance specifically.

If an individual’s subjectivity is in great part constructed by institutions, as Michel Foucault urged, how can the feminist project advance when marriage is still at the core of our value system? My work aims to intervene, counter, and rework the chronopolitical and heteronormative narratives of constraint, omission, and dominance that institutions like marriage still retain.

Looking at history in terms of sexual politics, I’m beginning to formulate conversations between, for instance, the radical utopian voices of the former free-lovers with those of the present moment, in an effort to illuminate a freer future-subject. Marriage, since its inception as a patriarchal concept of ownership, inheritance, and property law, perpetuates and retains ghosts of its discriminatory beginnings. Such apparitions are readily seen in the USA where over one thousand laws are dependent on marriage status. While gay-rights activists fought to legalize same-sex marriage to match these privileges, I questioned whether we shouldn’t instead open up recognized affinities to include more than singular romantic partners—so that one may assign different people as beneficiary or proxy to the various health, tax, and inheritance laws. Challenging the legitimacy of linear, normalizing constructions, my project seeks to link voices across time, to present a synchronous conversation of feminist utterances that reveal a sense of always having been present. I’m also evaluating how non-monogamous forms, like that of polyamory, might influence and shift perceived values at both individual and social levels.

Free love refers to a nineteenth-century movement that heralded a right to having many lovers outside the artificial constraints of marriage. My interest in this non-monogamous movement is that it was intrinsically tied to politics. The movement’s beliefs were formalized in the egalitarian structures of many contemporaneous intentional communities, like that of the former Oneida Community of New York State—a group that believed marriage was slavery for women; subsequently, each member was married to the group, and to maintain the group allegiance, members were encouraged to change sex partners frequently so as not to develop special bonds with any one member. Looking into the more recent history of free love, that of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, I’ve found it generally represented a more individualistic and less political pursuit, although it did later prove to have had important effects on the progress of women’s rights, like a woman’s right to abortion, for example.

Polyamory refers to the non-monogamous practice of having many special relationships in which, ideally, all partners are open, honest, and care for one another a great deal. While it has not yet been theorized much, what I’ve found so far is a discussion of subjectivity related to gender and power as they operate within polyamorous relationships. Only little discusses the larger framework of potential social and cultural implications, and the practice itself isn’t political in the way that the early free-love movement was.

With less and less people getting married, could the privileges connected to marital status dissolve within our legal system? How might the sexual freedoms of non-monogamous relationships be useful to feminism? How might the concept of chronopolitics be a useful strategy for feminism?

My research, interests, and voice are organized into individual projects of multiple installations. I build environments where ideas may play against one another to produce spaces of simultaneous knowing and unknowing. The project, Utopians Dance (2013), is comprised of two installations—A Reeducation and the titular Utopians Dance. The project simultaneously engages moments of the past, the present, and the future, exploring an individual’s journey through the lens of the social, while calling across histories of social experimentation to speak with subjectivities of today.

Within both installations viewers are invited to imagine themselves as the protagonist, and to participate in meaning-making. It is my hope that a collection of radical moments and proposals across time may result in an altered perception and reevaluation of the monogamous-normative state—a state of politics that rules our health care, family laws, and much more. The project is not simply a rejection of gender difference and marriage. The focus of the project is the desire for our value system to root somewhere else.

Utopians Dance seeks to create an open position from which a subject is placed in the possibility of dreaming through the disruption of linear time while also citing alternatives to the normative. My related research project departs from here with the desire to establish a new ground of resistance—refusing the positions we think we must assume—so that perhaps then, we may begin anew.

Désire , Waiting , A Reeducation , and Utopians Dance are installations that take up ideas of belonging, community, and individual freedoms. These projects are responses to constraint and an attempt to repair an alienated subjectivity through a notion of what I term, a chronopolitics of belonging--seeking new affinities of love and attachment that mix and disrupt a linear sense of time. The installations of minimalist sculpture provide space to commune and interact with others, attempting to destabilize the separation of artist, art, and viewer where real-time and pre-recorded time shifts and displaces bodily awareness and where the viewer may act as protagonist.