Redactions began with a fanciful notion: what if I could ask an abstract form—what exactly are you saying? I turned this into an assignment—loosen the mind that makes shapes and colors and ask it to pour out, to lay out, their meanings into words. Then place them side by side, abstract form and supposed meaning. This is a futile exercise, of course. The correspondence never holds, and we are grateful for this. But it is useful, it clears some assumptions—that these things which speak to us necessarily speak to others, that there is a way to separate things “just as they are” from what we imagine them to be.

And why redaction? A redaction announces that something has been covered over, erased, obscured. If I won’t say it, at least I wear the marks of what I won’t reveal. Redactions are in the air too, aren’t they? They mark our times—unspoken, possibly unspeakable acts covered over more or less successfully.

Redactions are text drawings that follow a set of rules for their creation, akin to constraints I use while choreographing dances. I create movement sequences alongside the drawings, thinking of each movement as a stand-alone “utterance.” They come together as spoken text and movement in performance. The visual pieces are 9 x 12 inches, watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper. Redactions is being developed in collaboration with The Chocolate Factory Theater, Los Angeles Performance Practice, and artist press Gravel Projects.