I split the world open, I don’t know for how long.

This performance was located within my installation titled “outside the length of a room OR diving into the blue sun,” where there is a large built structure that splits the space in half horizontally. The performance starts outside where I stand for an extended time looking in the window. There is a red bucket full of chalk and a white pillowcase full of items. I use white chalk to cover my skin and hair, creating a physical barrier of material between my body and the outer world. I walk inside, leaving white powder on the ground behind me. A yellow crowbar is removed from the pillowcase and I begin to score a line through the space. During this process, I reapply chalk to any exposed skin, leaving behind a layer of powder on the floor and a fine mist in the air. The scoring of the space starts on the ground and moves up the wall. At the top of the wall, I break apart the plaster with a hammer and the crowbar to attach a rope so I can climb down in the gap behind an immense false wall. The scoring continues all the way down behind the wall and up to the tall ceiling. I use a ladder, climb up built structures in the room, and create temporary platforms out of wood to reach all parts of the high ceiling full of exposed pipes and a ventilation system. The line continues down the opposite wall and across the floor to the starting point. The line is completed as continuous, vertically rupturing the space from the interior through construction materials including wood, drywall, plaster, and linoleum. I lie down on the scored line and draw another line as a continuous loop around my body, parallel to the scoring of the space.

This work is a study in splits in space and time, a work that is both specific and speculative, engaged with the potential limits and boundlessness of the line in relationship to space and time. The tremendous labor of creating line is treated as deeply tied to how place is defined. This work is performed to open up new understandings of how splits are a nowhere and nothing place, an opening of ultimate possibility where the line can define and destroy through demarcation.