Art.

Although people like to talk about art and business being two different spheres of existence, I keep finding it impossible to separate them. Marketing has always been, to me, a natural extension of performance art and vice versa: communicating effectively to an audience, saying things in a way they can understand to compel them. My artistic practice is largely performance art, duration performances more specifically (performances that are very repetitive that span two to twenty-four hours) and has always been primarily concerned with audience. I don't believe that art is a spectator sport; I believe that art should be immersive and that by viewing it the audience has no choice but to be part of it. By this definition of performative art, My Million Dollar Year is a year-long performance. I hesitate to make it an artistic endeavour though because the art world seems to be allergic to artists who want to be profitable and words like "sellout" get tossed around a lot.
	The Apologist. March 2001. In this performance I shaved off my hair and spelled out "I'm So Sorry" with the clippings. It was about penance, about the final apology that is definitive and can never be taken back, about deeds that cannot be undone, coming to terms with the demons of guilt. I had a shaved head for about a year later not as some symbol but because it let me feel the rain on my head.
	Diary. April 2002. I sat in the window of a gallery for five hours and wrote everything that came into my head, unscripted and unedited, onto sheets of notebook paper. When I was done each one I stuck it to the window, obscuring me from view. I wrote one page about how I once dumped someone because he didn't know how to use a semicolon and I didn't think that anyone who couldn't use a semicolon could understand me on a very profound level. I thought it was funny but a passerby read it and argued with me through the window that it was really shallow.
	Sticky. March 2002. I masking taped myself unclothed to the floor of the gallery for five hours. This performance was about hallucination; I asked people to come closer to me, as close as they possibly could, and told them not to talk to the floor or people would think they were crazy. I do not recommend taping yourself to a concrete floor at any time of the year, especially not the end of winter in an unheated gallery in Toronto.
	I Love You Don't Touch Me. March 2002. This performance was part of a show themed "pink". I sat in a prom dress with lipstick hanging from the ceiling, and the sign above me instructed the audience to apply the lipstick and kiss me. When they kissed me I screamed as loud as I could until they broke contact. I'm interested in people who lure the opposite sex and then seem mystified when they get attention they don't want.
	More Than You Bargained For. February 2003. This was part of a Valentine's Day show called Touchy Feely. I dressed up all cute and carried a box that said "Buy My Love, 25 Cents." I asked people really nicely to buy my love, and when they did turned into their worst nightmare girlfriend - pathalogically jealous, demanding, insane. They didn't get rid of me until someone else bought me. I was shocked at how many people said "Wow, you remind me of my ex-girlfriend."
	Tears. January 2003. In this performance I cut up twenty pounds of onions and gathered the tears in a shot glass. When the onions were all cut up I drank the shotglass full of tears. I expected it to be salty but I didn't expect it to taste so much like a bodily fluid. I don't recommend it at all.
	Wait. November 2002. I did this performance while the love of my life was away and I didn't know when he would be back. The waiting was killing me. I was in a perpetual limbo at this time - waiting for things to get better, waiting for school to end, waiting for him to come back, waiting for a lightning bolt of inspiration. For this performance I sat across from a digital clock and counted off the numbers aloud as they ticked by, from one to five hundred.
	Trapped. April 2003. This performance was part of my thesis series and dealt with love. I baited 100 mousetraps with candy hearts and backed myself into a corner, and then unbaited them with my hands. This was one of the most physically demanding performances I have ever done and during it I was witness to my own psychological conditioning: after getting my hands caught a few times it was incredibly hard to move my hands towards the traps again. This was a year and a half ago and I still have a mousetrap complex.