Hysteria is a fiction, created in the 19th-century by French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in tandem with the invention of photography, exemplifying a deep fear of female sexuality and reinforcing the belief that photography can be used as scientific evidence. These ideas are written into western cultural history, permeating how we image women and emotions. Women are taught that in order to be successful, we should not emote. For decades, I have worked tirelessly to be an even, thoughtful and emotionally evolved woman, in order to be respected as an artist, a professor, a friend and a partner. Fuck that. I want to be a boss-ass bitch.
In Deep Cutz each video is a re-preformed reality of heartbreak - I really cry, I am in pain, the words out of my mouth are words I have said a thousand times, the passages I am reading are from books I own. At the same time, I am some distant version of myself, acting out narratives that are overwrought and tired.
This work is a desire for agency and voice, a way to say all the things that I think I should not say as an adult woman and will never say directly. It is cliché and sincere and personal and obsessively self-reflexive and self-absorbed. It is a revelation and acceptance of my full, complicated emotional scale. This is my homage to the women who I watch, who I secretly identify with, on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, on The Real Housewives (of Beverly Hills, of Orange County, of New York), on Keeping Up With the Kardashians. I use these tropes that I am so familiar with to give myself permission to feel all of my feelings, without judgment. I have allowed myself to go to the extreme, to write and rewrite the events. This is as authentically me as I have been and yet resembles nothing like me. This woman is simultaneously on the verge of a nervous breakdown and wryly self-aware – hanging on, but barely.