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A person sits on a stool. In front of them, a small foam board. It reads: Engagement Art Experience No. 1.
The visitor approaches. What follows is a conversation. Not a performance, not a demonstration. A conversation between two people, one of whom has agreed to be present in the fullest sense of that word. To want nothing of the visitor. To respond from genuine self-listening rather than social script. To have nothing to teach and nothing to prove.
The visitor will never know exactly what they are receiving, or why it feels different from most human interactions. They will only know that it does.
This is what the work explores: the territory between our real feelings and our official ones. The space that opens when at least one person in an exchange has agreed to stop performing.
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A human artwork stands in the room, arms around themselves. Not as a gesture. As a practice. The self-embrace is the work's resting state, its center of gravity.
The visitor may approach. They may stand before the artwork. At some point, the artwork may release their self-embrace and open it to the visitor. They may not. This depends entirely on where the artwork is within their own experience at that moment. The visitor does not know this. There is nothing to know from the outside.
And as we stand there, we are confronted with how we construct meaning from another person's behavior. With extraordinary conviction. With emotions drawn from everything that has happened to us before this moment. Science has shown us that when not given explicit information, we almost always misread other people's emotional states. And yet the misreading feels certain. It feels like knowledge.
When the embrace opens we feel chosen. When it does not we feel its absence as something that reflects back on us. This is embedded in the architecture of how we move through a world in which other people's intentions are always, to some degree, both asynchronous with our own and falsely assumed.
The artwork's self-containment is not a verdict. It is simply the truth of another person's interior, which remains, as all interiors do, ultimately unknowable.
What the exhibition makes possible is the recognition of that unknowing. And in that recognition, something may quietly open. If not the arms of the artwork, then perhaps your own. Your ability to embrace the entirety of what you are revealing to yourself in that moment. No matter what it is. With unconditional attention.
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A designed encounter with the self, held long enough to become real.
A human artwork finds you in the gallery. There is no designated spot for what happens next. They lead you somewhere, by instinct, by their quiet read of you. It might be a corner. It might be near another painting. It might be somewhere you would never have chosen yourself. You make a little conversation on the way. It feels casual. It isn't.
When you arrive, they ask if they can ask you a question. You say yes. They ask: what is love?
You answer. They listen. They thank you, and ask if they can ask you another question. You say yes. What is love? You answer again. This happens five times. Each time the question is the same. Each time something different surfaces. Because the layers of who we are do not all speak at once. They need to be invited, repeatedly, before they begin to reveal themselves.
After the fifth answer, the artwork thanks you once more. They stand with you briefly. Then they tell you they have to go, and they leave. Pleasantly. Without closure, without conclusion.
What remains is the echo. Your own voice, asking itself what it actually knows about love. The answer to the same question, five times over, is never quite the same answer.
The path that brought you here was with someone else. And yet upon reflection, a path of your own agency. That lives in the echo too.
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This was my first experiential artistic project, made at twenty-three. Looking back, it makes me dimple.
I had been reading Vimala Rogers on handwriting and thinking about how letters are, in the end, shapes with a long history. Icelandic runes. Ancient marks. Spells, in the oldest sense of that word, that form the way we think and feel. So I became curious: what if you extracted the emotional residue of a single letter? Asked people what they felt when they saw it, held it, wrote it? And then let that feeling become movement?
We asked hundreds of English speakers to identify their favorite letters from the Roman alphabet and describe the emotions each one carried for them. Patterns emerged. We fed those patterns into an early Microsoft Kinect camera, which translated physical movement into projected language in real time. The poem being spelled out as dancers moved was one I had written around the same time, deliberately simple:
O ow, Oh, wow. No ow on we now.
Oh, ow. Oh, wow. We own we now.
Oh, ow, New we, we won now.
Oh, new we. Now we owe no one.
It worked, decently. And it was genuinely interesting.
The folly then, was assuming that emotional associations with letters could be made collective. They are hyper-individualized, shaped by the full weight of a person’s experience, and perhaps by nature too, in ways that are harder to explain. A definitive movement built from a definitive emotion was always going to be more specific than universal.
But the synesthetic pursuit underneath it, the attempt to find a language that moves between letter, feeling, and body, that I still value. It was the beginning of a long inquiry into what gets carried across when meaning moves from one medium to another. And what, inevitably, gets lost.
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A collection of people stand against the wall. Beside each one, a small card. On the card, a name. Martha Rothko. Willem de Kooning. Agnes Martin.
They were not chosen for their resemblance to these artists. They were chosen because something in them, something not easily named, resonates with something in the work. They are not dressed in the colors of the canvases. They do not perform the biography. They simply stand. Present. Themselves.
Occasionally, one of them might say something. A word. A fragment. Quiet, and not necessarily addressed to anyone. Not meant to be understood in any particular way. They go beyond ownership the way that art goes beyond ownership. More so, perhaps, because they truly cannot be owned.
What the names do is stop us. We have learned to stop in front of a Rothko. To give it time. To look without agenda, with something approaching reverence. That quality of attention is something we rarely offer a stranger. It feels voyeuristic. Invasive. Or simply, the world is too busy.
Here, it is offered back. The name creates the permission. And in that permission, something opens: the possibility of looking at another person the way we have learned to look at art. With patience. With genuine curiosity. With the quiet understanding that what is in front of us is a world. And that world, like all worlds, cannot be fully known.