KATHY

(with Angie Seykora) Collaborative site-responsive installation with projected video, ambient sound, reflective Mylar screens, sculptural objects, and lights; Maple Street Construct (Omaha, NE).

Kathy assesses the privileging of humans as "subjects" over and against nonhuman beings as "objects" by presenting site-responsive installation and video that acknowledge the limits of understanding agency, reason, and autonomy outside of human perception. Kathy, a bottlenose dolphin who played Flipper in the original 1964 television series of the same name, chose to die; she voluntarily stopped breathing in the arms of her trainer after retiring from the show. The circumstances surrounding her death serve as a point of departure to reveal discursive systems which reduce “objects” to mere products of human cognition and examine the process of distortion inherent in translating her story using representational formats that mediated her objectness throughout her life and death.