Sweet Throat

Title: Sweet Throat
self-portrait with mouth cavity filled and overflowing with sugar
2011

About the work: Sweet Throat is about grit, gagging, over-indulging, the senses and something good gone wrong. Whether reading Aurora Brackett's poem (below), viewing Sarah G. Sharp's artwork, or reflecting on my own health and internal states, I feel a sense of longing to connect to oneself, and struggling to climb and look beyond. This lead me to create the experience of being filled with a mountain peak of sugar crystals overflowing from my mouth. Similarly to the poetry, I am examining my own capacity and limitations.

The Other Side
by Aurora Brackett

a broken jaw
a brown may
symphony of light
from unseen
open source

gnathic: of or relating to the jaw

isn't this where desire lives
this first hinge
opened

hope in the waxed crease of lips

my jaws are mountains

in wanting you I wander

this is not a blazen
I have love my own name

this place
my crest
is restlessness

this place is basalt
nascent

the other side
spouting light

that catches
in my teeth
like sugar

This collaboration will be included in Sarah G. Sharp's project "From Dexter to Sinister."

More about Sarah G. Sharp:
Sarah G. Sharp is an artist who uses everyday materials to explore the construction and expression of individual belief systems and their relationship to a larger “community.” She holds an MFA in Studio Art and an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism and Theory from Purchase College, SUNY. Sarah is the recipient of a Getty Research Institute Library Research Grant and a BRIC Arts Media Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited and screened in numerous venues including The Aldrich Museum and Real Artways in Connecticut and Frederieke Taylor Gallery and Stephan Stoyanov Gallery in New York. Sarah's collaborative initiative From Dexter to Sinister will be included in the exhibition Here, There and Everywhere, part of the Transcultural Exchange Conference to be held in Boston in April, 2011. The publication of her oral history interview with the artist Elaine Reichek for the Smithsonian Institute’s Archive of American Art is forthcoming. Sarah is currently a lecturer in the New Media Department at Purchase College, SUNY and will teach Video Production in the Art Practice Graduate Program at School of Visual Arts in New York in 2011. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Thank you to Daniel Alt and Jill Nepomnick for their help with the performance.