"…the capacity of metafictional questioning to help the development of heightened consciousness…has been affirmed by the majority of critics as one of its most valuable qualities." —Karl S. Y. Kao

The Artist Statement is supposed to be about the self, and the art itself a “self-expression.” But I feel that my name and who I am is irrelevant—I am threatened by the notion that identity should mean anything, in a world where it’s become everything.

My many faces you have met—they have broken fourth walls and fifth walls, they have spoken to you in the second person, they have looked their cameras directly in the eye. 

My identity doesn’t matter, yet it is everything, because if it were different, I would be a person who thought it mattered. It has cost me everything and nothing at all. When it might have been trendy, I tried to leverage it—only to be laughed offstage. If I have to change my name to be heard, then how could I pick a new one? How could my name ever matter? 

They ask you about what you believe. You say you believe in God, and in that single stroke all worldly fences swing shut. You can hear the ring of this closure in your dreams.

In my work I am emptying myself of the multitude of lives I have lived. Perhaps they will be a comfort to the broken lives that you have lived. They are varied. They are the lives of

a girl trapped in a closet, 

a boy forced to trace the width of your country by catching rides on trucks, 

a woman with chronic pain waiting for death in a redwood forest,

a person of no gender who will never be certain if they are human, 

a prince who loses everything he knows and is forced to live in the world that we know—

All these lives and more—to share them in rich detail with words, to film the tragedy of my trying to empty them, to play the songs that would soothe them in the meantime: that’s what you might call my art. 

These lives are not a byproduct of drugs, or anything voluntary. They are a sentence, and my work a commissary.