Vernacular Spectacular (2012-present), is a performance video series featuring imagined characters performed and filmed on my own. In this ongoing study in character morphology, each video is unscripted and spontaneously improvised in front of the camera, using the accents, gestures and mannerisms I pick up from people I encounter, both real and fictional.

Through this Frankenstein’s collage of character attributes, I find I am able to say things I don’t believe, or that wouldn’t occur to me using my own personality alone. By putting myself in another’s, non-existent shoes, I am able to experiment with beliefs and persuasion, like flexing a muscle. These beliefs are deeply personal, and of course, as a by-product, political, and in this way play with the magic and possible perversions of rhetoric. In presenting conflicting philosophical points of view strung together with tenuously plausible pseudo-arguments, together the works evidence the fluidity of conviction and identity construction, suggesting that there is a certain art in believing, and a certain art in deciding for oneself what is real. By balancing between character and person, the works ultimately serve to problematise the distinction between ('genuine') being and ('disingenuous') performing.