ARTIST STATEMENT:

This ballet series reflects my experience and connections with the honesty of the human body, as well as the degradation of strength, frailty, and power. I'm seeking to capture the 'aesthetic experience' of ballet, and the fragility of different bodily connections through the contradictory impulses of strength and restraint that often go overlooked.

My desires to capture these aspects of movement connect to a personal empathy and experience that I have received from the act of dance. To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is grandeur on earth and it is the individual’s own to take. I have revealed these different roles of ‘identity’ and ‘power’ through the use of gender, using the male body and setting free the boundaries of artistic emotion and theatrical restrictions societally placed on them.

I am constrained by the scanner for this project, as well as the degrading aspects of digital manipulation, translating this 'aesthetic experience' into a processed, degraded, virtual one. I have liberated the camera, and invented an autonomous yet restrained scene and translated it into a frozen performance. Dance is something to be enjoyed as beauty while still within your own mental and physical restraints, and through this series I seek to expose this contradiction of aesthetics.