Pro-Wrestling as Modern Ritual

Currently my art work focused on the ever-expanding and ever- shrinking realms of public space and the transformative effect of public spectacle. Pro-wrestling provides a very organic source of inspiration and investigation into contemporary social interaction and ritual in our technological society. Wrestling provides its fans with a medium for thinking and expressing beliefs about their culture. Though it is absurd and full of buffoonery, it is also defiant, hopeful, liberating and unifying. Fans are not detached connoisseurs looking down on life, in the cold comfort of irony, they are total participants in a spectacle of their own making, shouting obscenities, throwing chairs and expressing their worries in a mob like catharsis of triumphant foolishness. Yet Pro-Wrestling isn't fooling anybody. The volunteery suspension of disbelief is paramont. It is a rite of passage into the "brotherhood" formed at the spectacle. The Wrestlers and their various mythos become the catylist for the group mind forming outside the ring, the performance created by the audience.

Viewing pro-wrestling as a performance and a form of sculpture, the wrestler’s body becomes an exaggerated expression of our inner desires, beliefs and emotions. Ideas of masculinity, narcissism, vanity, family, sexuality, death and dying, bestiality, primitivism and schizophrenia are encapsulated in the persona of the wrestler. These ideas play out in the ring and are tested, manipulated and transformed with every pin of the opponent. It is more important for the pro-wrestler to make their character believable and to reinforce their mythos than actually win the match. This friction between performance, spectacle and the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the spectator has a transformative effect and can also function as a measure of the beliefs and ambitions of American society.

Get To It Gallery and Beyond

For the past 3 months I have embarked on a new project involving re-routing/nu-routing of public space and architecture. The Get To It Gallery Project has manifested itself as an online map of spaces in my neighborhood that have potential beyond their original design. I use these spaces as a way of engaging my own physical potential and at the same time create nu-potential for our public environment. Through the process of seeking out these spaces, mapping them, moving through them, I have gained a deeper understanding of them and a since of belonging to them.
The most liberating thing about the project is that my engagement to the spaces I move through satisfies any desire I have for creating art in the public. This satisfation has made me question the reasons for making public art in the first place. Much of the art I have done in public has either manifested in support of some kind of political movement, social justice and the like. I guess that a huge part of my interest in making things for public space comes from a desire to manifest some sort of community, a group mind, existing beyond the inner personal relationships of our daily lives. Relating to the physical nature of our environments has made me rethink my purpose for making art in the public. I find my self sizing up buildings, rooftops and stair wells. Designing routes and new ways to move through these spaces, and at the same time reclaiming space, making it my own. The goal of mapping our environment is to create an understanding of how to navigate a space, getting from point-A to point-B. One goal of the Get To It Gallery is to reinvent what Getting from Point-A to Point-B means. Its not about the destination, its about the journey.