“Bull Market” represents a meditation on super-capitalism, spirituality, and deicide. My collaborator Zacry Spears and I traveled to NASDAQ in Times Square where I beer-bonged three twenty-ounce Red Bull energy drinks while wearing a concrete-washed suit and anti-gravity mask. In 2003, my father rang the NASDAQ closing bell, just a few years before the American housing market crash in 2007. In my mind, this time of prosperity and the sharp decline that followed mirrored the dying and rising god narrative in Western Christianity. I imagined the elasticity of the American financial market within the context of gravity and resurrection, and ingesting Red Bull as a way of inducing this hysteria within myself.

As the trading floor negates linear time, it transcends the landscape. Using post-human character design, I yearned to transform into a god-slayer, an agent of deicide that has transcended the landscape herself. During the performance, I double over as my body rejects the material in futility. I crush the cans against my head as I finish them—they are stepping stones on a road that leads to hell. For each onlooker pausing momentarily, an endless stream of pedestrians filter by unfazed. Doused in concrete rubble, the body becomes a site of disaster, a spiritual battleground.

Through cinematic and conceptual collaboration, my colleague, Zacry Spears, liberates these images from the archival documentation and recontextualizes them within the mythical and nonlinear timeline that inspired them. When it is finished, I sit on a bench nearby and shake. A man invites me to a comedy club. In “Bull Market,” we return to the site of the crash, only to be implicated as absurdly and recklessly as the market. There is a classic relationship between brutality and powerful transformation, and to deny it would be to reject the breath of the universe; the rise and fall of all living things.