To Do: Cowboy Mouth: Young Artists at the Chelsea

I became involved in Cowboy Mouth: Young Artists at the Chelsea
I was brought in as a performance artist by the Director, Rebecca Feinberg and the Producer, Amanda Hameline. Though we went to college together, we actually didnt work on any collaborations until this one.

My performance-art piece, The Traveling Bag, is
A performance that deals with stuff, with packing and with what gets left behind. Its very improvisational, and ultimately has multiple iterations depending on where it is performed. Since I am performing at the Chelsea Hotel, a famous port of transit for artists of the last century, there is an additional layer of meaning in the work.

And it ties to the Cowboy Mouth theme
The Hotel Chelsea has seen many bags open, close, be broken, be lost, explode The suitcase has been the most consistent character in this building. My aim is to bring The Traveling Bag into the world of Cowboy Mouth, so it becomes a synthesized collaborative work.

The art bug bit when
The art bug bit a long time ago. Its always been present; as a child I performed music and acted professionally. As an adolescent I continued in music and made my forays into art. By the time I got to college, it was clear that making art was a priority to me and my personal happiness in the world.

My work is about
It deals with history, it deals with being alive today. It attempts to bring the past into the same specter as the present, and future. It is dark but funny, and its serious but loose.

Why performance art
One of those things that has distilled itself on my horizon. Performance keeps following me around, no matter how hard I try to assuage it from my practice, it continues to reveal itself as a strong and meaningful art form to me.

My art influences
Louise Bourgeois (!), Bob Rauschenberg, Phillip Guston, Robert Wilson, Frank Sinatra, William Faulkner, my family.

As an artist, I could never be without
A little bit of magic.

One personal anecdote about Hotel Chelsea
Dylan Thomas, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, all heroes of mine from a young age I used to picture them in their destitution and dream of that reality becoming mine. Its exciting to work in a space with such a rich psychic history.

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