Skinned The Lake is a multimedia live performance that engages my body in real-time with audiovisual projections in a gallery or performance space. It explores the sensory experiences that emerged from multiple site visits I made in September and October to the shoreline of North Avenue Beach in Chicago. During these visits, I sourced and recorded repetitive embodiments of listening practices to the lakeshore sands. The real-time projections in the gallery/performance space capture close-up shots of the performer’s body, accompanied by specific sounds from the lakeshore.
The audiovisual performance emphasizes the importance of “life cycles” by exploring the meanings behind the repetitive patterns of the lake’s waves, as they come in and out, resembling acts of arrival and departure. More specifically, the work examines how humans can attune to the aquatic rhythms between the imprints left by the sand on the body, the movement of water, and the natural process of human skin cell regeneration.
Statement
These traces, brought to life through live performance, are magnified through close-up projections, enhancing the textures of the body and its interaction with these materials.
“Decay and Renewal”
Lakeshore sands perform as active agents, carrying the imprints of the lake’s long history. Each grain is a fragment of geological time, shaped over millennia by cycles of erosion, deposition, and movement.Cadophora, often seen as detritus or waste, takes on new meaning as a focal point for exploring the lake’s ecological cycles. Rather than being discarded, these materials are transformed into symbols of interconnection. The performance challenges anthropocentric aesthetics that prioritize cleanliness and order, embracing instead the messy, excessive realities of natural processes. Through this, the work calls attention to the ways in which we are bound to the material world, our bodies always in dialogue with the larger cycles of life and decay.
“Stickiness”
Through the audience’s sensory engagement—visually via projections and aurally through the amplified sounds of peeling and scraping—the work evokes an embodied awareness of temporality. It invites viewers to experience these sticky materials not merely as static objects, but as reminders of the constant flux of time and change. Inspired by the philosophy of base materialism, which rejects dualisms such as pure/impure or high/low, Skin(ned) the Lake embraces the raw, chaotic forces that underlie life. The act of peeling cadophora and sand from the skin confronts us with this base materiality, where the wet, coarse, and organic elements of the lakeshore become symbolic of the body’s own materiality—its entanglement with decay, renewal, and transformation. This intimate and unsettling tactile process highlights the porousness of the body’s boundaries, framing it not as a closed system but as a site of exchange with the environment.
