2000, Audio Monologue, Audio Tracks, Walkmans, Headphones, Red Plastic Chairs, Dimensions Variable 

“In Voice of Reason (2000) we listen to the artist’s monologues as she observes people’s behaviors in public spaces: eating in restaurants, sharing cutlery, sleeping in other people’s beds. The extreme sense of self-consciousness the artist incites through her meticulous observations of these everyday, mundane events questions the fine line between routine and obsession; interactions in public spaces are recorded as moments of risk where we are exposed to the ‘dirt’ of strangers. Artist and audience alike operate as both phobic subject and studied object. On the surface, it is the bodily threat of infection by strangers, of contamination by others’ germs that is feeding the artist’s neurotic contemplations. But this ‘surface’ holds a far darker subtext: threatened body in threatening space reveals the way prejudice, resentment and fear is inscribed on both body and psyche.

In this sense, ‘dirt’ is political. It speaks of an abject presence, of an anomalous ‘in-betweeness’ that shadows the oppositions and classifications we rely on to maintain a sense of cohesive self. Us/Them; In/Out; You/Me: things fall apart. Our fear of dirt (of pollution) is a fear of disorder within the structures of culture and society that allow us to make meaning.” 

David Brodie