University of Nevada, Reno. Version 2. "Night of Performance," "Honest as Hell II: Poltergeist." University of Nevada, Reno. A group show of solo performances with five others. Poltergeist was a performance mixing sound and action before an audience. 1993.
In 1993, I was asked to be a part a night of performance, which was, I believe made up of a bunch of us that had been in Joanna Freuh's first seminal performance art course at the University of Nevada, Reno. Influenced by ideas of ephemera and especially the "Happenings" of Alan Kaprow, Dick Higgens, George Brecht and The New School, which brought a kind of individualistic, "Mannerist" approach to performance art, it's narrative, symbology and approach.
This was also the first of my art pieces, aside from a few drawings and any preliminary sketches, that dealt with the idea of the sheet ghost/ghost. Ghosts, at this point were one of the few, truly biographical objects that I allowed myself at the time, though, I still believed in the Rauchenberg/Johnsian ideal of denying the artist's presence in their own work. This is something that I continue to back and forth with, never settling on a single position of comfort. Though, it's interesting to note that the drawing I ever turned in for an art class at UNR, was entitled ,"The Fan/Fanatic" Something that I would come back to once I was at UCDavis, several years later and which would lead me to far more autobiographical work. I suppose that, if I'm honest with myself--the work is fairly autobiographical and always has been.
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