"By high school, I hated almost everyone and I read insatiably. Both, in their owns ways, sprung from a lousy home life. Both functioned as an outlet for me. The anger was redirected from sources at which I wasn't allowed to strike back, and books distracted me from anywhere I didn't want to be...which was mostly everywhere. But it wasn't until some black-clad friends and I wandered into an occult bookstore on Clark Street -- it seemed a suitable stop for us -- and I picked up 'Rants and Incendiary Tracts: Voices of Desperate Illumination' that I realized a book could be a political act. A book could function as a punch in the face, a rallying point, a riot, a revolution, for both author and reader. I had never read anything as venomous as some of the short works of sheer rage collected in Bob Black and Adam Parfrey's anthology of speeches, poems, tirades, tracts and manifestos. I was in love. Not with all the tenets espoused, necessarily -- but with the energy, with the focus. It all clicked together. Not much time ever manages to pass when I don't think of 'Rants,' usually when I'm showing my students the subtle fury of American slave narratives or watching them process the utter contempt and ultimate beauty of Existentialism. Books are acts of rebellion. And as it turns out, they land me in a lot less trouble than a fistfight."
"A 10-year-long conceptual theme in my artistic practice has basically been an attempt to quantify individual human existence. In 2002-2003, I began contemplating the tie between a mental and physical self. The more similar a perception of ones self is to an outside perception of that self, the more "real" that whole self could be. Then in 2007, I read the chapter, "Having An Experience" in Art As Experience by John Dewey. I stumbled upon the use of the word real as in "real experience." Dewey refers to this as a means for labeling situations and episodes. "In such experiences, every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues." (pg 36) The idea of experience, or a lifetime of experience, as a fluid whole changed my way of thinking - Humans have a singular train of thought that speeds around the brain creating polyps of repeated experiences and webs of associations connecting similar and new experiences to the next. Therefore time is directly proportionate to experience (or train of thought). A person will only become whole at the moment of death, when time in their perception ceases to exist. My current 2013 artistic practice and general existence are still deeply influenced by these ideas. I have an innate need to fill my physical time and space with mental movement and momentum. I choose to do this by creating visual artwork of my philosophically insatiable train of thought and anatomical interpretations."
"Growing up, I used to collect books. I liked being around them but couldn't stay interested long enough to read any to their entirety; I preferred comics and cartoons. I was a book-faker, reading and skimming required works just to pass the teacher's quiz or exam. Then, as a sophomore at Purdue University in English Literature, I was introduced to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. My interest in reading truly began with the first sentence: an admonission, "All of this happened, more or less." I went on a surreal journey to Dresden and back, analyzed portions of life with Tralfamadorian perspectives, and when I finished the last page, I headed to the store to celebrate the rest of Vonnegut's catalog. "Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." (p. 39) Years later while working for a television network, I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Vonnegut after Man Without a Country was published. I was speechless, frozen in the presence of Genius while he was interviewed. When the show was over, I thanked him endlessly and turned fangirl as he drew his mustachioed profile and signature on the title page. Because of Vonnegut, I learned the joy of reading." "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt." So it goes.
