This is a small box.
This is a big cat.
This is a small box. This is a big cat is the latest in a series of performance experiments wherein I set out on a walk with intention. For many, the pandemic delivered us into new relationships with the act of walking. Coinciding with my exploration of performance art, walking became a way for me to shift the way I interact with my surroundings while exploring the possibilities inherent in placing one foot in front of the other.
This is a small box.
This is a big cat.
Documentation of Presentation Installation of Documentation of Performance of
This is a small box. This is a big cat.
In this Self-Reflexive Walking Experiment, I don an ominous trench coat and walk the streets while holding an animal carry-box that emits the vocalizations of captive lions. Up close, one is able to glimpse into the box and see looped video footage of a lion in captivity who paces back and forth right at the fenced boundary of their allotted territory.
The deliberate disjunction and play of scale caused by the size of the box and the seemingly contradictory soundscape gently references my personal experiences of social captivity - knowing myself, deep down, to be expansive, big and grand while often having experienced the world in constrained and imprisoned circumstances.
Though originally a performance walk, the video and installation with performance ephemera offer viewers a more controlled experience of the work in its current state. Blurring the lines between performance, performance for video, multimedia installation, the work reinvents itself with, and for, every viewer.
While tightly referential, and deliberately idiosyncratic, the work generously offers multiple entrypoints that allow it to open onto discussions of performance, captivity, control, agency and freedom.
In the end, I am both the lion and the “caretaker” - groomed to monitor my every move and fit in while forever pacing, forever questioning the ideological borderlands and the limits of my freedom.