No Title, 1999 derives in part from my readings and mis-readings of writers working with the theories of Jacques Lacan. In these texts I find a language refering to a split-subjectivity, and describing the conditions and events before, during and after such a splitting can take place. However, before entering my work as image, the theory is corrupted by my imagination.

An eight-foot square, eight-foot high wooden box is installed in the gallery. A small sliding door reveals a red-rimmed window which viewers may approach one at a time. Inside the box, heavy black velvet theatrical curtains line the walls; the ground is a field of black, glittering sand. Here, on view in the gallery, a female performer, painted white with a faceless, perforated sphere for a head, performs three tasks abstractly related to formative stages of infancy. The performance lasts for two hours.

In part one, she sits with a bowl of white glass pellets in her lap. She places a pellet from the bowl into a hole in the top of her head then spits it out through another hole in the front. The pellets land in the sand at her feet. In part two, she stands holding red powder in the palm of her hand and makes slow circles like a mortar and pestle with her opposite elbow. In part three, she jumps off the ground and hangs suspended in a sling by bungee-jumping cords.

Adjacent to the box, a station with a red chair and a small white video monitor shows stills which sequence through the three stages of the performance. Stylized with colored light, tight framing and analogue video degeneration, the imagery is difficult to decipher. Although the video component is intimately scaled, the monitor is backlit so that viewers who sit in the chair find themselves spotlit and the video uncomfortable to watch.

The three parts of the performance are staged in microcosm in three corresponding segmented areas of the body. The first event isolates action in the head region; the second unfolds in the torso's midsection; the third is executed through the feet. Miniaturizing the performance and encompassing it, the performing body takes on monumental, symbolic proportions.