“The internet, to me, is a feminine space… Women and young girls have always been the best at using social media platforms, so when we talk about digital art, it’s important to include gender and performance in that conversation.”
Speaking of physical space, can you describe where we are? What is Heart?
Heart is a curatorial project I started in 2024. It grew out of a series of fortunate events: I’d been wanting to platform artists in my orbit, engaging with the internet, software and pop culture — those three categories encapsulate what I’m interested in as an artist and curator. At the same time, I started working out of this studio, which was much larger than I needed, so I wanted to use it to bring people together in-person.
The internet, to me, is a feminine space, and what Heart presents is really trying to wrap around that. Women and young girls have always been the best at using social media platforms, so when we talk about digital art, it’s important to include gender and performance in that conversation.
You were also early to the Addison Rae train. She was the subject of your piece in Heart’s first Sacred Screenshots show.
I’ve been interested in her since the early days of TikTok. She’s so skilled at posting on the internet; I talked about this in my performance, “StarQuest.” She’s been trained for this. She grew up as a competition dancer, like me, so I understand what it means to be engineered as a performer, to be appealing to a wide audience, but also be very feminine and sweet.
How does your experience as a competitive dancer help you understand how we perform online? As an artist working with AI, what does it mean to “coach” pixels to do what you want?
“StarQuest” was the most psychologically challenging work I’ve ever made. In the piece, there’s a coach that says, ‘Are you going to get out there and choke? Or are you going to be exceptional?’ It echoed how I hold myself to this impossible standard, which is something I’ve carried over from being a dancer.
Part of why I make work, especially this piece, is that I feel like I’m always on stage and I’ve never been able to escape that. I’m older now, and reflecting on the years that I’ve spent online, I have a really different relationship to the internet. Making the piece, shifting roles from dancer to coach, really solidified that.
