Love Letter To Marina

The concept for this portfolio of performances came from my deep love and respect for the work and life of Marina Abramovic. I have been inspired by her performances for years, as have many, and have now studied her more than any other artist while I’ve been at the University of Washington. There were several reasons why I chose to recreate some of my most favorite pieces by Abramovic (& Ulay) but most notably I find that performance art, especially in a public context, can be a foreign practice for me. I often find myself lost in “the mindset of a painter” and thought what better way to break out of the studio and into performance than by attempting The Method through the actions of Abramovic herself. While I have curated and participated in some socially and publicly engaged performative pieces in the past, it hasn’t been a medium I have fully embraced within my own practice yet. So why not attempt some of the most daring performance pieces to come out of the contemporary art era, right? I, with artist Trace Johnson, recreated and performed Rest Energy (1980), Relation in Time (1977), and Portrait with Scorpion (2014)/Dragon Heads (1990) in three different parks in three different cities around the Greater Seattle area.

This portfolio borrows from Abramovic’s early performative aesthetic and seeks to promote all of the same concepts of the ephemeral, the durational, the balanced, the energetic, the powerful, the political, the spiritual, and the challenging that she & Ulay originally conveyed. While the recreation of it stands as more of an artwork as homage, I found that completing this series of actions was cyclical and rather poetic for me as today is my final day of college, and Marina has always been a consistent focus throughout my higher education, it felt only right to me that my final assignment, my last school project ever, would be of and for her. At this point in my creative development, out of art school and desperate for a job, I might as well embrace the words of Dorment in his review of Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present and take my place as one of the “spaced out art students who, when I last saw them, were still standing just where they’d been positioned, motionless as statues.”