I Think Am No Longer An Artist

I Think I’m No Longer an Artist is a durational performance and installation happening over 24 hours to lay bare the unseen realities of the life of an independent artist—the unseen toil, the creative burnout, and the tenuous line between identity and survival. Rendered as a living installation, the performance involves an endless cycle of doing and undoing, integrating action and inaction, movement and stasis, writing and office work.

The performance demonstrates what very rarely gets observed: the endless emailing, the projects done on one’s own dime, the waiting and silence, and the constant struggle to make an appearance when the value of presence counts for little. The body of the artist itself functions both as the worker and the artwork. With such urgent intimacy, the performance compels viewers to sit with the struggle that quietly transpires while art is being made. It urges the viewer, instead of consuming the product, to bear witness to time, vulnerability, and endurance as material. At the end of it all, the performance iterates upon the precarious line between being an artist and the machinery of art and what is left of either when productivity outguns presence, when doing overshadows being.