UC San Diego

My thesis exhibition consists of four acts, with each act manifesting in a total of four locations and nine separate performances. Act One took place at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park, with the following three acts on UCSD campus and in downtown San Diego. My thesis work conjures up a viewer's relationship with performance art, as well as ponderings from my own identity and my critique on the interactions and exchanges of the people in Southern California. The work appears as hand crocheted, full body masks that perform self-generated rituals articulated by an actor. Each performance is meant to guide a viewer into a participator, to direct a physical or psychical engagement with art, performance, and actor. In my thesis, my hope is that the viewer develops an emotional relationship with the work I create, which alters their relationship with the work of performance in and out of Art Institutions. In my paper, I describe and locate indigenous impulses for ritual, the use of myth in contemporary culture, and a spiritual energy surrounding a person experiencing Art