Audience / Camera / Performer
an interview with Kris Grey
part of the group exhibition with
Elliot Reed
Rashayla Marie-Brown
Seung-Min Lee
Wanda Riamundi Ortiz
Curated by Clifford Owens
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Describe the process of developing your Untitled performance piece. As an interdisciplinary artist, how do you know what mediums suit certain concepts?
How is the performance aspect of Untitled necessary in conveying its themes and how would this change if explored through a different medium? In 2009 I expanded my studio practice to include work on and with my body. Having spent both my undergraduate and graduate time in the study and practice of ceramics, I take a craft approach to using my body as raw material. I started to alter my body through technologies of the medical industrial complex to interrogate the relationship between pathology/medicalisation and trans experience. I worked in collaboration with Lania D’Agostino Studio in Baltimore, MD to cast the entire body three different times over three years from 2009 to 2012. At the time I did not have any idea about how these body casts, or any of the other archival materials of transformation, would factor into my work as an artist. I started performing with my body casts in 2012 and I have continued to do so. Activating the cast of my former body in live performance allows me to time-travel with witnesses. We can go back and forth between different embodied times. The performance draws attention to my body in a constant state of becoming.
Vulnerability is a key aspect to your work, both emotionally and physically. In your eyes, does offering this level of intimacy to your audience by using yourself as the vehicle influence their perceptions of gender embodiment and transition?
Vulnerability and generosity are the key tenants to my live performance practice. When I place my body in a state of extreme vulnerability, my experience with audiences has been that they meet me there with their own vulnerability and presence. To be together in a state of radical presence fills me with a kind of hope for empathic connectivity. I have had all kind of intersectional experiences with folks who are trans as well as those who are not. People who have experienced pregnancy often feel aligned to this work, even if my identity is radically different than theirs. So too, folks who have experienced breast loss due to cancer treatment have shared powerful reflections with me after seeing this performance. Sometimes people are surprised at their reactions because they didn’t before have any cause to place their experience alongside someone who is trans. Being pregnant, having cancer, and being trans are all part of the spectrum of lived experience and all of those experiences are shaped by systems of power that attempt to control bodies.
I would love to hear more about the cyclical nature of the Untitled performance. How does it explore the nonlinearity of time and how do these themes come through in regards to gender transition?
In the performance, I alternate between standing inside my body cast looking out at the audience and then outside the cast, with the audience, looking back at my former body. I repeat this cycle, using my former body as a sort of mask or portal. The cyclical cadence allows the audience time to be with my body across a decade and that gap will only continue to grow as I age. In our dominant narratives about trans experience, there seems a strict focus on “transition” as a complete process. The reality is that all bodies are changing all the time.
During the Q and A after your performance you spoke about having performed this piece for roughly a decade now and how your relationship to it has developed along with your medical transition. How has this performance been essential in the way you reflect on your former embodiment, meditate on your current state, and look to the future over the course of the past decade?
This work, and others like it in my ourve, can serve as my attempts at healing myself through my practice. This need grew over time in response to navigating a binary world as someone who has specifically altered my body so that it cannot fit exclusively into a male or female category. One of the greatest gifts of my practice is that it allows me to see my body as beautiful.
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Could you speak about the evaluation of your performance piece? As you grew into your vulnerable expression, did you notice any changes in the way you conducted yourself within and outside of the performance?
The score to this piece has changed over time. The first iterations included the torso suspended from the ceiling, lighting inside the cast, painting my whole body white to match the cast, and phosphorescent paint along my scar lines that would glow when the lights in the room were dimmed. Over time, the things that were not essential got edited out. Being flexible and allowing the work to make its own transition over time has led to its current state. The first time I performed this piece without painting my body, members of the audience cried and one person in particular was sobbing almost uncontrollably. There is a lot of information in the audience after a live art experience and I try to attune to the room each time to gather the responses.
I am curious about the residency of your body cast when it is not necessarily employed by your performance. I briefly spoke about the feeling that it almost has a haunting quality when it is left alone– specifically within the exhibition space of Audience/Camera/Performer. Do you sense a consciousness in the piece? How do you navigate both your separation from the cast as well as the attention garnered from an audience viewing?
I think a lot about the slipages between bodies and objects. Take, for instance, the constant censorship of certain art objects on social media. A rendering of a nude body might cause that image to be taken down to uphold “community standards”. I experience the cast of my body as having a powerful resonance. When I am away from it, I still feel tethered, as if a part of me is inhabiting a different state or plain of existence.
How do you feel your performance fits in with the other artists? The show brings forth a myriad of very interesting topics– the removal of active performance being one of them. Perhaps relating to the question above, how do you see your body cast adding to the overall experience of the show? The audience's experience?
When the cast of my body is on display, it is meant as an offering and as a framing mechanism. The other work of mine on display in Camera/Audience/Performer is an infinitely looping video work called Precarity where I am balancing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders on my head like a victorian posture exercise. Both pieces signal to the presence of a body in some sort of paused state, almost as if taking a frozen moment in time and drawing it out. I was delighted to have my work in conversation with Rashayla Marie Brown, Seung-Min Lee, Wanda Raimundi Ortiz, and Elliot Reed. All of the artists in the show grapple with liveness and its simulacrum through lens-based media. The addition of performance ephemera, and in particular the cast of a body, begs the audience to question the very state of aliveness, in the absence of live human bodies.
I think one of the interesting aspects of your performance is the physical act of removing yourself from the ‘safety’ of the cast, into a very vulnerable state of exposure. Of course, this also provides a very relevant narrative of power, of stepping away from the past and giving space to reexamine it with the audience. What I am curious about is the abject separation– how separation plays into the performance as a whole, as well as how it may show up outside of the performance? Relating to the actual cast being left to inhabit a space outside of your observation.
When I talk casually about my body cast, I like to joke that I am carrying around a casket containing my former body. Some trans folks do not wish to revisit their former bodies. Some trans folks record their voice, photograph their changing bodies, and use that information to confirm their transformation. As vulnerable as it is to be nude with a live audience, it is also vulnerable for me to step back into my former body. Aside from my morbid sense of humor, I am interested in observing what people collect about their lived experience and what they release/destroy.
What I feel now that is different from how I felt prior to 2009 is that I trust my body more, current and former. Every foundational system in the United States ritually harms trans people, especially black, indigenous and other trans people of color. I am constantly unlearning all the normative systems of power that have controlled me. Stepping into my experience of being non-binary and transgender has helped me shift my focus from “visibility” towards an interrogation of systemic trauma.
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