Something very magical happened to me recently.
As a young child, the only music I grew up listening to is two cassette tapes of Russian children's choral music from the 70s which my family had brought to New York when they immigrated: the Big Children's Choir. They sang everything, from songs about imaginary animals and folk songs, to dark Soviet anthems and ballads about battleships. A few months ago, while scouring the infinite cosmos of YouTube, I accidently stumbled upon all of the videos of the Children's Choir performing these songs I knew so well, in hilariously-staged black and white videos of kids standing on pedestals, singing with the forced, overdone facial expressions and theatrical gestures they were strictly ordered to perform with.
I realized that both the videos themselves and my discovery of them essentially summed up everything that is fascinating and moving to me on many levels, in both my artistic practice and my everyday life. It is this tension between something so unquestionably real as the songs themselves (and my sentimental experience re-living them), and on the other hand, the artificial, over-dramatized fakery of their expressions and then their subsequent conversion into downloadable, Google-friendly clips on YouTube.
My work in performance, video, and installation exist in that space between authentic human experience of the past and present, and a constructed fantasy world that is defined by mimicry and fakery: the hyperreality of contemporary culture and consequently, our everyday existence. There is no question that our consciousness has changed; the ways in which we experience culture are becoming more fragmented and our attention spans are short, the distribution and intake of information viral and chaotic.
I am searching for my own truth not despite this new consciousness but instead, deeply consumed and seduced by it. I am as obsessed with the Eastern gypsy songs of my ancestry as I am with trashy music video culture and flashy advertising schemes. I believe that it is precisely through this speedy fragmentation and many layers of fabrication and appropriation that we can come to a new reality and a higher art form.
As a result of my father's profession as a set designer, I grew up attending one opera opening after another, watching Wagner and Prokofiev masterpieces in velvet seats at the Met. In a way, I am constantly trying to reconstruct the essence of the orchestral symphony, the aria, the chorus, but in this new context, through this new language of the present world.
Whether staging ritualized chants of hip-hop music in a chapel, choreographing movement from religious gestures, conducting a symphony out of superficial conversation, filming a Russian fairy tale made entirely of music video-style samples, or having ants "watch TV" in tiny stylized human living rooms, I'm always asking: What is authenticity? Can we "sample" human actions and rituals? Does something lose it's authenticity and integrity when it is taken out of context and reconstructed? Could there exist something greater, something more "real" within all these layers of fiction?
