Artist Statement
My art practices querying cultural, gender, and sexual politics. I am concerned with tackling subjects that are usually confined to subcultures or to the private sphere, in an effort to spark dialogue and encourage the consideration of transgressive subjects in a new light. I prioritize collaboration with other people and artists. I am interested in the ways bodies move, interact and perform through a shared physical space. We create new/constant moving forms. The interaction with the audience and breaking down the fourth wall is a key component in my practice. In recent years, I have been interested in communities, collaborations, and anti-sports.
I explore the site-specific environments of my performances within the architecture, nature, the built space, and the collaborators’ movements around them. My practice has always been from a DIY, artist/activist, kinksters/BDSM perspective and it is continually evolving. In most of my performances, I use needles, string, elastic thread, found materials, and connect my collaborators with their environments. I consider consent and safety paramount. DJs, digital artists and lighting folks are often included in the performances. Photographs and videos are taken to document the live events.
Artist Bio
Xray Aims (they/them) is a multidisciplinary performance artist, a queer and disabled person, who works with collaborators in long durational pieces. These intersect art and kink in an effort to connect humans to one another, and beyond. Their work engages with beauty, pain, the built environment and the bodies. Movement, communication and the audience are key.
In 2020, as the pandemic took over, and collaborating with others became too fraught, Aims followed a dream and went to work on a solo installation called BasketArt Court. Using deconstructed bike tubes, they wove them into a long rope-like structure, from the backboards to the middle square knot, in the court near their home. This then evolved into a 2021 film that screened at several festivals.
They have gotten back to the practice they love, with collaborators, and completed two performances, one at nighttime and one at daytime, both outside for the first time, in NYC at Le Petit Versailles, and one experimental performance called “The Wonders” in November 2023.
Aims is constantly working on different projects, as well. DATUM, is about their personal photographs, and the concepts and actions of archiving, displaying and distributing. They hope to have a show for DATUM (first in 2010) in the near future. Aims is in the process of organizing, posters, photographs, videos, media coverage, etc. of the Truth Serum Productions (truthserum.org), a business that they ran from the 90s to 2014. They are planning to find the right archive for it all.
As an artist their work has been performed/installed in solo and group shows in the U.S., Canada and Europe. In 2023 alone, they have been awarded the Collective Futures Fund, Assets for Artists / MASS MoCA’s Massachusetts Statewide Capacity Building Grant, and the Mass Cultural Council: Cultural Sector Recovery Grant, along with Boston Center for the Arts: Studio Residency Program 2023-2026. Xray Aims was born, and lives, in Boston and earned two Bachelor Degrees, in Fine Arts and Architecture, from Rhode Island School of Design.