Lion!, 2018, performance still, 25 minutes.
PHOEBE OSBORNE
Artist Statement
Phoebe Osborne’s practice is grounded in choreographic sensibilities, folding together material, psychic, and social traces of life through a matrix of video, sculpture, performance, writing, and sound. Through making art with and for their friends, Osborne intentionally centers a quality of intimacy in their work that stretches to their protagonists, materials, and the breadth of their creation.
Osborne prioritizes movement as an extension and insistence on being. This, negotiated through their lived experience of chronic pain, has led them to consider systemic stresses and accelerating depletions of life-sustaining environments. Their practice of making is mutually a site of deterioration, razing the languages of identity, nation, and culture that divide and render intimacy insentient. Osborne resists this inherent fractioning with a proposition towards “flaking out,” or reorienting towards a praxis of translation, relation, and care. Flaking-out opens the potential to engage wreckage as a space for relational imaginative dreaming.