1) Still Life: Israel eats itself (2008) 2) Mechitza 7.1 (motion activated beta) (2010) 3) The 71st Face (2012) The sample consists of 3 clips from 3 different works, each of which illustrates methods, materials and content I want to expand upon and push further. 1) Still Life: Israel eats itself (2008) (super 8, dv, surveillance camera.) Endurance performance and action painting in a 5.1 surround sound installation. Video art derived from documentation. Performer covers his body with a black substance, then scrapes it off and eats it. The sound art, composed in 5.1 surround, incorporates a field recording with a PTSD afflicted Israeli veteran, in which he quotes the biblical verse: "...Israel will become a people who eats each another." The imagery references the black paintings of Goya, the scatalogics and “Eye” of Bataille and the Chassidic concept of klippah—the shell that both nourishes the physical world and gives it its shape while necessitating its own shedding in order to access truth. Unpacking experiences with gender is a thread that runs through much of what I do. I critically consider what I have access to now versus in the past in relation to masculinizing my own appearance: how much of that is determined by me and how much by other people, in terms of the eye of the beholder and larger systems of power, living in a misogynist culture and patriarchal structure. In this piece, the human body is an analogue to landscape, land occupation and “Holy Land.” It’s concerned with the place at which the human body becomes the subject of a state, and citizenship makes moral and ethical claims upon our bodies -- masculinity in Israel as a way to talk about the state and the relationship of gender to power and hegemony. Still Life is a 4D portrait of a gendered identity invented by and then cannibalized by the state. 2) Mechitza 7.1 (motion activated beta) (2010) Collaboration, as an ideological model for a way of manifesting, was a method implicitly aligned with the conceptual activism Mechitza 7.1 endeavours to do. Attached is a copy of the score we demonstrated at that event. A mechitza is the architecture in a Jewish prayer space that separates women from men. Each of the gestural phrases in the score articulates a different relationship between body and concepts of border, boundary, and confinement. In this project I am simultaneously thinking about concepts of border and limit, using Jewish literacies, as part of my ongoing work as a live artist in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. I designed a method of collaboration for this project in part as a way to let go of ownership of my archive of field recordings from the middle east and from my old religious life. I have since then used this method as a pedagogy at Hollins MFA Dance program, and would like to clarify it further. 3) The 71st Face (2012) The voice is the place where all your symptoms, everything that's going on with you is immediately apparent. My proposed project involves bringing my own body back into the work, starting by using my voice. In 2012 I performed my first ever solo vocal performances in about 10 years, in memory of queer and FTM friends who died or committed suicide in recent years, and the femme widows they have left behind to deal with the shatter, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the passing of my father. The repertoire is all material from Jewish Diaspora, some from Central Asia/Eastern Europe, some Yiddish, some secular and some liturgical chant—but all of it engages ideas of physical transformation predicating destiny in some way, motifs of unrequited love, death, and transformation. My interpretation of the songs engages queer utopia in relation to Jewish concepts of destiny, longing and the messianic. What this content illustrates re. my proposed work: My new work will take the form of live installations as I’ve done before for camera, but with site specific endurance performance for live, a cappella, transsexual voice. Voice, as it relates to time and presence, and performance as an effort to stretch out a moment, photo/video in empathy with the gesture itself. This parallels a Jewish way of talking about time, thinking about the continuous present and an experience of time that is not linear but simultaneously forward-advancing. To resist moments of before and after.