Research + History

RESEARCH

The research behind the ideas in Object of Her Affection goes back to 2010. My wheels started spinning when I stumbled upon footage of a woman who wanted to marry an amusement park ride in Strange Love: Married to the Eiffel Tower, a BBC documentary. The documentary, directed by Agnieszka Piotrowska, profiled lives of objectum sexuals, including Amy Wolfe and her display of affection with “1001 Nacht”, the name of the amusement park ride.  While her story was unusual, there was something relatable and refreshing about her authenticity and earnestness.

As an artist who recontextualizes objects and puppets, I’m constantly thinking about animism and the suspension of disbelief.  As a queer person, object sexuality resonated with something deep inside me that had been festering: on the one hand sexual minorities were making great strides. On the other it seemed like LGBT identity was being gentrified in a heteronormative push towards respectability politics.

You bet I was fascinated by the concept of Object Sexuality. There was something appealing about the emotional, physical, and romantic desire towards inanimate objects. Object Sexuality explodes traditional categorizations of sexual identity and turns our often cliché ideas about love inside out.  Object Sexuals fall in love with things, rather than humans. They don’t so much want a place at the table as they may long for a relationship with one.

I wanted to know more. As I delved into research, I also learned about Erika Eiffel, another of the domentary’s more articulate subjects. She appeared on a number of talk shows like Tyra and the 2013 documentary, Animism: People Who Love Objects (where she discussed her falling out with the Eiffel Tower and the park service).  I also reviewed  a number of episodes of My Strange Addiction that touch upon objectophilia (and related identities) including a woman who marries a ferris wheel and a man who has intimate relations with his car.

HISTORY

In 2011, I was putting together an artist talk about the role of fantasy in our daily interactions with objects. Even though my slide-show was fun (it covered puppetry-adjacent fetish topics like furries, high-end sex dolls, and masking) and toured art colleges, a dry lecture didn’t really encapsulate my investment in the material. There was something more to it that felt deeply personal – this universal need to find love.

I thought about my own life – mining my own autobiographical material from a safe distance. During a retreat at the Eugene O’Neill Center in 2012, I began the script. Something about merging my own experiences with the stories of people who fall in love with skyscrapers into a hybrid narrative seemed to get to a deeper truth.

After a series of readings and performance excerpts, I teamed up with director, Michele Spears, to determine staging in scale. In 2014, we presented versions of the performance for test audiences at Automata and REDCAT in Los Angeles with support from the Henson Foundation, The Center for Cultural Innovation, The Anna Sosenko Trust, and Hatchfund.

In 2016, I made (In)/Animate Objects, a large-scale installation for the COLA Artist Fellowship that formed the second half of an installation-performance diptych with Object of Her Affection.  The installation focused on the excesses of the protagonists, Andrea’s doll-hoarding grandmother, years after Andrea fell from the building she was in love with. For the installation I created over a thousand handmade, distressed rag dolls with a pop-up team of collaborators that testified to the insatiable need for love at the heart of the obsessional life.

In 2018, Los Angeles Performance Practice curated Object of Her Affection into it’s LAX Festival. There was a three-week run at Automata with funding from the Henson Foundation and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

SUPPORT