Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

My work uses dance and drag to consider the performance of femininity as a powerful, vulnerable, and subversive act. I emerged out of a feminist, postmodern, improvisational dance and choreographic lineage, but grew toward a tradition of radical queer performance that uses decadence and drag, both to entertain and transcend.

My practice of feminism celebrates femme glamour as masterful artifice, and my intimacy with both the oppressive and empowering effects of feminine tropes allows me to create a zone of play from which I make my particular critique.

Since 2003 I have been deeply engaged in an ongoing performance project, Fauxnique, my drag queen persona. As a lens through which I magnify my artistic concerns, Fauxnique typifies and expands the evolution of drag-based performance. This cultural moment’s openness to discussions around feminism and gender allow me to refine the sophistication of the feminist line of inquiry in my work.

While at Headlands

I will expand the feminist arc of my current body of work, which includes a memoir-in-progress about drag. I will engage the landscape of Headlands with its history in mind to delve into research. How is this land—stolen, occupied, rescued from development—an allegory for feminist and queer resistance? How can I use my performance practice to reenact the audacity of that resistance?

I crave, perhaps perversely, to place my over-adorned, drag queen body in its environs. By situating my practice of artifice in the trees, grass, and hills of the Headlands, I draw attention to fakery. I highlight my position as an invasive species, as someone/something that does not belong.

Selected Works

“ The F Word”, 2016.

Disintegration Series, 2014.

Instrument, 2012.

A Glamour, 2009.