Amy_Laughlin

artist : statement

If identities were no longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready-made subjects, a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old.
–Judith Butler

I love a parade, a march, a protest, an intervention, a subversion, a staging, a competition, a test of endurance, limits, thresholds, transformations and change. Those places of categorized identity in which I can retune to become places that don’t fit so neatly into a category; places in between male/female, gay/straight, internal mind/external world are the visual locations of my work.

I employ performance, installation, video, photography and any other means appropriate to examine and disrupt boundaries. Suggesting the permeability and mobility of “permanent structures” accentuates the constructed nature inherent within our personal ontology. Tearing down gender binaries and questioning categorization of sexuality expands the libratory potential found in new fluid definitions of gender as performance.

My performances have taken the form of “gender interventions” whereby I, along with other collaborators, dressed in drag, enter into a public establishment such as a supermarket, lingerie store, or golf course and then spontaneously react to events that unfold. Another intervention consisted of performing a one-car parade in honor of a fictitious couple, “Mr. or Miss Gainesville”, whose “real” identities/genders are in question.

The future is as bright as a shiny tuba at sunrise, or at least it might be, if the institutional policies and cultural barriers, and assumptions of identity begin to crumble under their own weight of contradiction.