 I thought I'd begin talking about the piece that I have in the show, a binding ritual daily routine, and this is still from the video. The video is around an hour long, it was an hour long performance, during which I bound my breast with duct tape and then took the duct tape off and did this action repeatedly on both breasts. I want to move to some images. This was a live performance that I did at Art of Space. The same kind of thing, so I wanted to show you these so you could get a better sense of what was happening. This piece deals with the issue of people being transgendered. If you're not familiar, female to male transgendered individuals are people who were born into a female body, but they feel like they're a guy on the inside. In our society, there are very typical things that make us appear female or male, breasts being a huge one. A lot of these people may bind their breasts down every day for their entire lifetime in order to fit into what society says a man looks like. What I wanted to do is put my audience in this position of seeing what it might be like, not over just a lifetime, but I'm compressing that into an hour. The live performance was really important because I had the audience there and you got to see as time went on, as every time I ripped the tape off, there was an abrasion building up on my skin, so it got more and more sore and more and more red as it went on. I think it put the audience in that position of seeing not just the physical pain that transgendered people may undergo, but the mental space as well. I can't imagine what it must be like to feel like you're in the wrong body. I don't know if any of us could really know what it's like, but this piece hopefully puts you in that position of seeing what it could be like. I wanted to move on to the next piece. I started out doing photography and lately I have kind of jumped into the performance realm a bit. This was a piece that I did at Conner Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C. My research with the transgendered people kind of brought me one day into thinking about the idea of hate crimes that were specifically used against gay, lesbian, bi and trans individuals. I wanted to find this list. I wanted to know how many people have ever been murdered due to a hate crime. I wanted a very specific list. I wanted names, dates, what happened. As I was researching, I couldn't find this list anywhere. The FBI does collect data, but the data is incomplete because they don't require individual states to report the statistics. States can report, but they don't have to. I started compiling my own list off of internet sources, off of maybe family members who had someone who was actually murdered and it was labeled a hate crime. I compiled a list of 438 names. As I was compiling this list, I not only was finding names, dates, but I was also reading about the crimes that were happening. These crimes a lot of times are very brutal. I saw over and over again that not only was a victim murdered, but their body was defaced. Sometimes people would carve and dig or fag it were two really popular things for the body to be done to the body. I thought a nice relationship would be to have these 438 names tattooed on my body but with no ink. This is the start of this performance. I started with the word anonymous to signify that this was my list that I found that I definitely did not find every single name. Then alphabetical order, we just started from the top and went down. This was tattooed with no ink. What you're seeing now is blood raising up, but this isn't necessarily a permanent thing. As the tattoo was done, I had someone place a note card on the fresh tattoo and what happened was a contact print basically out of blood. You saw a list compiling on my body. You saw a list of the tattoo artist was working from and you also saw a list that was compiling on the gallery wall and of course it came out backwards. This is an installation shot of how it happened. The performance lasted over 11 hours. We began at 6 at night and we invited viewers to come in. I thought it was important for people to see this firsthand. But as the night went on, we did ask people to leave the gallery, but it was webcast. Again, I thought it was important that people could actually see the entire performance, but this also was a very long night and I needed a little bit of time to reflect on what was happening without such a crowd around. This is just a close-up of some of the names. The names, if you notice, do repeat at times. Just because I found maybe five Johns, I didn't want to just put one John in there. I thought it was important to signify that, no, these are five separate Johns that were murdered and yes, it was labeled a hate crime. If you're familiar with that labeling at all, it's very difficult to actually get something labeled a hate crime and there are good reasons for that and there are bad reasons for that, but it was very important for all of these names to have actually been labeled one. This is just a final shot from head to toe. I had no real plan going into this as far as where on my body it was going to end up. I just knew I wanted to begin at the back of my neck and go down and then if we needed to flip over and start on the front, then we would continue on, but it just happened to fit just like you're seeing it right now. This wasn't a permanent piece. It did eventually heal and I have no remnants of this. All that remains are the cards, which over time I think is pretty interesting. We knew it would happen, but have kind of changed color and changed over time as well, so that was of interest. The final piece that I want to talk about is a piece that I did less than a year ago in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn. This again is kind of dealing with labels and as I was doing the note to self piece, I got to thinking about the words dyke, faggot, words that we call each other, words that at times might have held great importance, but communities have kind of adapted them to take away some of the power. Dyke, for example, I think before in the 70s, maybe that was a very, very derogatory word towards lesbians. Now the lesbian community has taken that, reclaimed it, and within the lesbian community, I think it's more of, sometimes you're proud to say, yeah, I'm a dyke, you know, it's a defiant type word. I think faggot, for example, is not as acceptable, maybe within that community, but it's always difficult if you're in the community or if you're out of the community. There's definitely a separation. But with this piece, I invited people to come right, derogatory words or terms that they've used or they've had used against them on my body. So this was a space, you know, I'm saying it's okay. I want you to think about words that you might have used or words that you might have been called and I want you to write it on me. I want you to know, I want people to see. I'm giving you permission to use this word, to say this word. And then this in my mind also, again, relates to those words that were carved on those people's bodies, I mean the dyke, the faggot, but this is more of me having power of my audience members having power and reclaiming some of these. I came from this thinking of dyke and faggot, but obviously many, many words were used. I was really surprised. I think one of the words that were used the most often was cunt. Tons of women wrote this word. And it was interesting, this performance, I didn't interact with people unless they spoke to me first, but many people related stories. You know, somewhat, I've been called this word every single day of my life. Or one time I called my wife this and I've regretted it every day since. So the power of words, I think really, understood the power of words, but this I think really brought it to the forefront of these can really hurt, these can really change lives, but we also have the power to reclaim some of these words and we can make them not mean the way they're being used against us. So again, this is just kind of a broad shot of what happened. Many people came up, you know, I wasn't necessarily always able to control what people wrote, but it was kind of nice, the self-regulating that went on. Someone started to write something that really wasn't related and I could hear someone else say, man, do you know what this piece is about? You need to really think about this before you write. Kids would come up sometimes and I heard parents explaining to their kids, you know, has anyone ever called you anything that's hurt your feelings? And I heard a kid say, yeah, but I don't know how to spell it. And then the mom said, oh, well, here you go, S-T-U-P-I-D, stupid. And that was really interesting because as adults you don't always consider there are some main words that we think about, but think about when you were a kid what words really affected you. So that is the end of the presentation. If you guys I guess have questions, I can talk about them in front of my piece that was on. Okay, great, thank you.