“What We Talk About When We Talk About Me” was made in response to a prompt from curator Chanel Kim to create a durational performance work for the opening of the Ephemeral Memorable exhibition presented by MURMUR at Mammal Gallery.

Taking its title and general premise from Raymond Carver’s famous short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” for “What We Talk About When We Talk About Me” I invited one person at a time to share a drink and a conversation with me, however the only topic on conversation would be me. Each participant was provided with a list of rules; they were allowed to spend as much or as little time with me as they would like and we could talk about any topic, as long as that topic was myself. In keeping with the exhibition’s theme of ephemerality of the rest of the show, none of the conversations were documented and only exist in my and the participant’s memories.

There’s a tension that exists in the piece between the absurdity of the narcissistic gesture of granting a stranger a private audience while dictating that the only topic of conversation would be myself and my commitment to being completely present and open in my responses to whatever questions my “audience” would ask.