When I look at art, I want to be challenged. I want to be engaged in a dialogue with a large, comprehensive world that is unruly, beautiful, horrible, enigmatic, but of which I am nevertheless a part. I want art to be so intense that it takes on a different existence outside the gallery, an existence that comes out of debate and grows to be so much larger than its original incarnation. I wish for an art that doesn’t play it safe, that just exists out of the necessity to communicate. The characters in my work are part of a simple narrative: there is a woman who means to leave her humanity behind. She wanders into the dark woods, where she encounters a pack of rats. The woman asks the rats: “Will you cut open my abdomen, pull out my intestines, and string them up to the firmament?” She explains that it is imperative that her corporeal body remains alive during this procedure, as she must ascend this intestinal ladder to the heavens, where she can enter the realm of the gods. She must be in full possession of her mental faculties. In return for this boon, the rats may eat her body as soon as the task is accomplished. The rats agree, and the pact is sealed. The physical elements of my work manifest themselves through my narrative. Though the narrative is centered on the consequence of a state of being that comes out of a reading of a poem by Yeats, it is my fiction. By writing the story as a simple myth, it allows me to sneak into its subtext questions that have always interested me: what are the conditions of reality? How bounded are human perceptions? What would it mean to be a superbeing, or a god?

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