being an athlete is a part of my identity that i have been trying to separate from in order to move forward into new sectors of my life and in order to grow. unfortunately, being an athlete still comes with challenges. there is a difference between being injured, and injuring yourself.
as i have begun navigating this forward movement into finding new parts of my identity, i have been trying to heal my relationship with my health. as my track seasons end, i find myself unable to form an appetite in fear of changing my body and not recognizing an athlete of 14 years in the mirror reflection. guilt plagues me for eating without it being a reward system.
for this project, i decided to record myself eating my first meal of the day outside while the dogs play. part of it was accountability and the other was to see my reaction afterwards in an attempt to reflect. the fear is deep rooted in the sport i participate, and within myself. this is a working series.
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I have some of the same feelings when it comes to doing the same routines every day. Nice job mixing in the stills with the music. The music reminds me of my own anxiety around routines, so I feel as it fit in nicely.
acne has been an issue i’ve dealt with since i was 10 years old.
i remember my first pimple on my nose for picture day. my mother helped me pop my first one.
a strange memory.
since then it continued to worsen.
i’ve tried every acne solution under the sun.
nothing…
it’s genetic, i’m told.
my grandpa, my father, even my uncles suffered with terrible acne and eventually scars.
for so long, it has blocked my confidence and self perception. i try and smile through the pain of wanting and wondering what it would be like not to have acne scars.
i spend a lot of time staring into mirrors for someone who doesn’t like their own skin.
so i dressed my scars up with little stickers to make them seem beautiful and not ugly for today.
I was kind of lost as to where to go for this project, but I wanted to something about gender performance. I realized a really fun and simple way to talk about that was makeup. I am non-binary and I find a lot of joy in picking out where on the spectrum of gender I fit for the day, and really expressing that. I love putting on makeup when I’m feeling extra feminine and its a super fun practice for me. Makeup has turned into a lot of different things for a lot of different people, but to me it’s an incredibly useful tool to help me feel like myself sometimes. This is just me having fun with it!
So, I have Tourette Syndrome, and multiple occasions I've been told by friends, an art professor or two, and my sister that I should do a video and/or art based on my tics. However, I have always disliked being in videos or taking photos because they almost always capture a tic or two and I hate the way they look. I avoided the idea of filming. my tics for a while because it felt weird and a bit personal, but I continued coming back to the idea and decided to go for it.
I placed myself in a white "box" that I created and dressed in black. I intended for the lighting to be more direct and shine mostly on my face, but I struggled to achieve this with the supplies I had at home. The goal of the white box, black clothes, and lighting was to capture how it feels for me to tic in public. Most of the time people hardly notice, but it feels like everyone saw or heard it. Now, I know about the spotlight effect where we have a tendency to overestimate how much other people notice about us, but tics take that awareness to the next level for me. As my tic disorder from elementary school developed into Tourettes my freshman year of college, I began to cope through humor (healthy humor!). It's made life with unintentional stretching and shaking, occasional cussing and random sounds much easier. Additionally, it always feels like a bit of a taboo subject for others to talk with me about, and I want to break that barrier. So in my performance piece, my goal was to not suppress my tics, and also not laugh at the bigger ones like I normally do (I slipped up a few times, but that's alright). I filmed myself for about 5 minutes, and then cut the video down to the "best" segments of my tics. (however, the video is sped up to get close to the 1 minute mark)
Although I only have a few at the moment that you can see in the video, I have a whole array of tics that aren't displayed in this video. In my attempt to become more comfortable with my tics and normalize talking about it, I'd like to share a few with you!
I used to click my tongue with my mouth closed
sometimes I pound my phone screen kind of hard with my fingers while I type
for a while there my right hand would shake like I was doing jazz hands
my vocal tics tend to circulate around words with the sounds "st" or "t" (hence the words in the video shit and just)
luckily, for the time being, my tics aren't hindering my day to day life, but I have one or two that makes eating very difficult
oftentimes, I'll copy a word or phrase that someone says to me after they say it (this one makes my sister mad lol)
The tics in my video include:
I'll clench my stomach a few times in a row
touching the tip of my nose
a weird throat sound?? (i hate this one!)
some words
stretching my neck
and blinking weird
Thanks for reading this far and watching my tic attack video :)
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For this project I had no idea what I was going to do and I did not have many ideas. I considered doing something involving flowers and pictures of myself but I thought if I did a series of myself eating would have a better result. I had to set it up right so the viewers could see me eating but also my plate clearly. I propped my camera up so it was high enough to see over the lip of the plate. I used this idea to show myself how important it is for me to eat and how much fun it can be. I definitely do not eat as much as I should so I have been making more healthy foods that are fun to make and enjoy. This series really pushed me to make something good for myself and enjoy it without thinking about it. The final photos turned out exactly how I pictured them to. I had a lot of fun with this project and I hope it represents the performance of eating.
I choose to do my own take on The Artist is Present
After watching the documentary I thought it was such a powerful piece I want to recreate and experience something similar using animals in a natural but slightly surreal environment.
I wanted the piece to obviously have some humor to it, but still show some connection
to the characters .
It definitely was fun and I loved the process of getting the whole thing together.
Even though I work in film and commercials I still enjoy putting together all the moving parts of a project..
One dose of testosterone takes two needles to administer: one large needle to draw the thick carrying oil from its vial and one thin needle for the actual injection. For this demonstration, I removed needles from my sharps container two at a time and drew a tally mark on myself for each pair, representing one dose or one week of medication per mark.
Sharps containers are designed not to have anything retrieved from within, with edges that catch painfully on withdrawing hands if the whole appendage reaches in. By taking this unintended action for each mark, I sought to represent the burden of performance on transgender individuals: society demands lifelong medication and surgical procedures to grant people a sliver of legitimacy, and those without the means or desire to medically “transition” face scorn or disbelief.
The parts of me visible in frame are arms demonstrating action and racking up tally marks, a bound chest, and shoulder acne. For all its typical undesirability, the acne is one of my preferred traits, as shoulder acne was the first sign that my medication was doing anything over the span of several doses. By contrast, I am medically unqualified for a chest masculinization surgery at present, so the archetypical transmasculine trait of a binder both represents a conformity to the expectations of young trans men and my inability to be fully accepted.
A minute was not nearly enough to extract and count all my used needles, but I sought to demonstrate this weighing of “good trans person” points in that time. Unfair expectations are placed on people who do not bind, tuck, undergo voice training, get expensive surgeries, or lose weight to transition; people can forgo these due medical reasons, financial limitations, safety concerns, closeting, comfort, or any number of other reasons, and doing so does not make them any less transgender.
Performance art makes me uncomfortable. I understand that creating discomfort is often part of the purpose of a performance art piece; the artist challenges the viewer to examine the source of their discomfort surrounding an idea or issue. For me, the source of my discomfort is not necessarily with the issue being addressed. Rather, it is with the performance itself. I personally dislike being the center of attention and I dislike causing conflict for other people. When watching (or even reading about) performance art, I tend to imagine myself in the place of the artist. Just the idea of my being the center of attention while deliberately trying create conflict for the viewer is generates a lot of anxiety for me.
Needless to say, I approached this assignment warily. While I could generate several different ideas, I really didn’t want to do anything. Ultimately, I chose not to do anything at all other than simply confront my own aversion to being the center of attention. I set up a camera so that I could see myself and sat for a full hour as the camera took a time-lapse video of me watching myself. I did not enjoy it. I fidgeted a lot and my expression was often somewhat pained.
I don’t think this exercise changed my discomfort regarding performance art. Watching other people’s videos will likely be an uncomfortable experience for me. However, I did appreciate taking the time to really understand what it is that I have never enjoyed about performance art. Perhaps by understanding what I don’t enjoy will allow me to ultimately get past it and come to appreciate performance art more.
Thank you for being so open and honest, I could feel the feelings alongside you and agree that being the center of attention is so hard. Sitting for an hour doing nothing is hard, and especially in a world where we have so many distractions.
For this assignment, I wanted to show the finalizing part of the installment of my 3D project. This piece expresses my worlds of dissociation. Living with ADHD and dyslexia assists the unlimited potential behind the dissociation worlds or anxiety/depression lows I've cultivated through my twenty-year dwelling. Dissociation has many positive and negative connotations that are complex and challenging to explain to another being that has not experienced this other world. This work expresses the questions I had during my dissociation highs and lows that always stretched back to the common thread of hands. Specifically my hands.
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*I recommend watching this with headphones, so you can hear the white noise, as well.
Forced to Look
Everyone has heard the phrase, “Eyes are the window to the soul.” Therefore in this piece, I wanted the focus of the performance to be on the eyes as if we were staring at each other for one minute straight. Staring often makes one uncomfortable like you’re being judged in some way or another. However, looking into someone’s eyes can tell you a lot about them like the quote above mentions.
The performance itself was uncomfortable for me, but I wanted to try to do something I’ve never done before and that would be interesting. Either way, both artist and viewer participant in the performance and face discomfort through the continuous staring.
For this project, I was interested in using repetition to explore a meditative state. I lost track of the minute--which quickly turned to three--as I watched paint pool in varying opacities. I wanted to allow mistakes and unevenness. At times, my hand lost the pattern of the grid. The unpredictable end result became a part of this meditative process, a reminder to call in a lot of ease--a tenderness I believe we could all use as the semester winds down.
Lastly, here I am reminded that "repetition is a form of change." While I can resist routine, favoring a little controlled chaos, I must remember that no single effort is ever the same as the last, and that often it is by staying true that we may continue to evolve into greater and greater versions of ourselves.
This was a performance I really had to think about. I wanted to convey a message that people could ultimately interpret on their own so that they could better relate to it. Weather it is anger, addiction, depression or something else, I feel like we all can hold things in to a degree. Eventually they can consume us and create a bigger issue. When sometimes we just need to let go and take a second to look around.
It’s the end of the semester, and I’m quite tired. I love art, but I’m so tired. And when I’m tired I like to go home and snuggle in my Comfy. When I’m sad… I snuggle in my Comfy. When I’m sick… I snuggle in my Comfy. In my art I strive to make myself face feelings of being un comfy, I grow best this way (as long as I know I’m not gonna die!). I strive to push myself as much as possible however a lot of the time it becomes very isolated and cold. Thinking of a performance in 1. minute, I almost went mad. Instead I got really smart- I did what I knew would make me uncomfy. Because I’m tired and I’m ready for summer.
When you stepped into the shower I instantly felt like it was a metaphor for stepping into the stressful life of finals/society. Also, “I love art, but I’m so tired.” really says a lot to me, I feel the same way and not just because of finals.
Unfortunately, I didn't have the right environment or the time to record my piece. However, the concept for my piece was based on my disliking of labels that society puts on people. In my own opinion, we don't have to be identified or defined by certain things based on different groups of people that we are associated with. It seems like our society makes it so that we have to act differently depending on the group of people that we are with at any given moment. To demonstrate how frustrating, unsure, and anxiety evoking this can be, I covered myself in labels to weigh me down and make things uncomfortable and difficult for me to do things. If I were to do this performance/experiment piece I would have gone out in public with a sharpie, tape, and paper for people to have other people put a label to who I am. The lesson of my piece is that we as people should be seen for who we are, not just defined by one characteristic amongst certain groups of people. We should be able to be who we are amongst all groups of people that we reside with.
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For this assignment I wanted to utilize music, as playing and performing music used to be pretty integral parts of my life. I didn’t want to just sit down and play a song, though, I wanted to communicate a feeling that otherwise I don’t talk about very often. Music, above all else, was my only coping mechanism for the life I was raised in and for the overwhelming feelings of anxiety that I felt as a young teen.
In this video, I’m trying to recall some of the chords to one of my favorite songs to play, “Even if it’s a Lie” by Matt Maltese, although rather unsuccessfully because of the chaotic noise in the background distracting me as well as my lack of practice with it. The papers surrounding me are some of the many songs I’ve written in my lifetime. The noise in the background may be the chaotic events outside of the moment, maybe they’re my internal feelings of unrest, but regardless I keep pushing through to get to the song. I no longer play much because a lot of the feelings I was trying to cope with no longer plague my life, and I was never interesting in becoming a big performer anyway. Regardless, it holds its place in my heart and I’ll pick it up from time to time in order to relive the peace that it brought me.
Was interesting to see the different clips, and for each one I expected you to fix your camera view. When you didn’t, it made me feel slightly uncomfortable. Bravo.
Candice Moore @seemooreart - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
