Facing Myself

(2020)

A long term durational performance, done with the express purpose of confronting myself in a series of different ways. Using a life-sized, hand crafted dummy, made with the purpose of being able to look and talk to myself for an extended period of time before allowing myself a release in the destruction of the dummy.

The performance took place over the course of three days, in eight hour chunks every day from 12:00PM to 8:00PM. During the whole of the performance I was also filmed and live streamed to Instagram Live for onlookers to watch during the entirety of the performance and interact through comments as they saw fit. It should be said that this performance also took place during the COVID-19 lockdown, so in turn there was also a strong echoing of my actions in the performance with my experiences of everyday life in self isolation, spending the majority of my days alone in a singular space. 

The first day of the performance proved to be the hardest fought of the days as I sunk into the position of performing over the first eight hours. The day started with me sitting next to the dummy on a couch, slowly drawing on to it first my tattoos, my scars, then freckles. This beginning act was a practice in deep physical examination of my body and using it to replicate myself unto the physical form, all the while telling stories related to the different events leading to my various tattoos and scars, while leaving freckles to be a bit more meditative. Also during time there was jumping around of telling stories, resting, and at one point talking through mind game scenarios from the book 10 Games You Can Play In Your Head, By Yourself. In the end the first day was summed up to be a thorough examination and dissection of myself in my current state, which would allow me to set the stage for the proceeding two days.

The second day began with a bit of reflection of the previous day and I would continue to reflect everything past in the performance for the rest of the duration. The main crux of the second day of the performance was me going through an additive process with the dummy where I continuously drew flowers all over its body in marker before then painting onto the body and clothes more flowers and bits and pieces of writing. The final hour of the day concluded with me dismantling and destroying the dummy in a variety of ways, from ripping its arms off to cutting its torso open to rip out its filling. In the end this day was about an acceptance of self that ended in a ceremonial release, symbolically allowing personal growth

The final day was centered around separation and the idea of moving to the next step of life. This culminated in the eight hour live stream for the whole of the time being the dummy by itself outside and destroyed only being viewed by myself and the audience that followed along with me on the journey.