February 2026

Wild Suburb investigates the liminal space between isolation and belonging through performative self representation, humour, and strategic use of kitsch. 

The project employs animal masking as a critical tool to examine the social negotiations that structure everyday life, drawing on traditions within performance art, postmodernism, and popular culture.

The deer mask functions as an embodied metaphor for vulnerability and self protection. Initially adopted to mitigate fears of judgment, rejection, and exposure, it became a means to engage with strangers, enter domestic and suburban spaces, and renegotiate interpersonal boundaries. Its cultural ubiquity, as a kitsch commodity and as a figure of North American wildlife, enables a productive slippage between sincerity and satire, “high” and “low” art.

The project originated in 2023 during preparations for a performance at an academic conference in Lake Louise themed “Troublemakers.” There, I inserted myself into the tourist spectacle, photographing visitors as they photographed me. This reciprocal gaze, inspired partly by a comic strip in which a deer disarms a hunter and points his own gun at him, highlights how authority, authorship, and spectatorship can be inverted through playful intervention.

Personal history shapes the conceptual stakes of the work. As the last surviving member of my family of origin, having experienced significant loss across my life course, I've developed what Erving Goffman might describe as a “protective façade” to navigate social environments. 

Mobility across diverse regions of North America further reinforced an understanding of “thick skin” as a pragmatic strategy for integration, while recognizing that belonging, when achieved, allows for greater permeability and openness.

Animal masking provides access to a cross cultural, historically persistent ritual practice in which adopting a nonhuman identity facilitates transformation, catharsis, and social experimentation. Deer, in particular, carry personal significance through lived experiences of hunting, consumption, and mourning, as well as broader symbolic associations with strength, beauty, courage, and wildness. These attributes infuse the character I embody, shaping my own “presentation of self in everyday life."

Although Wild Suburb uses humour and play, it also operates as a coping mechanism, an orchestrated mode of social interaction that mitigates anxiety while inviting community participation. While some dismiss masking as deceptive or unserious, I position it as an ethical and expressive strategy. Deception without malice, intended for protection or revelation, can illuminate aspects of identity otherwise obscured. 

Moreover, many institutional contexts; academia, the military, professional workplaces, implicitly rely on forms of social masking as markers of maturity and competence.

Over time, however, I've become increasingly uneasy about inhabiting the identity of a real animal. The act of “becoming-deer” raises questions about representation, and the limits of interspecies identification. This has led to the adoption of a new figure: the jackalope. 

As a creature rooted in modern folklore, pop culture, and satire, rather than lived animal experience, the jackalope enables a less ethically fraught mode of embodiment. It permits both masking and unmasking, maintaining a protective structure while allowing for reflexive critique and self-parody.

A metal helmet functions as both armour and scaffold, supporting the exaggerated rabbit ears essential to the jackalope mythos. Through this shift, Wild Suburb continues its exploration of identity, vulnerability, and relationality within suburban landscapes, while using humour and artifice in mediating human connection.

July 2025

“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.” — Maya Angelou

The deer occupies a distinct place in my imagination—elusive, attentive, and perpetually on the threshold. Half-seen at the forest’s edge, he embodies a form of liminality that becomes a metaphor for belonging: present yet not fully accepted, visible yet not entirely seen.

As a figure that appears in global mythologies and ecosystems—from the white stag of Celtic tradition to the sacred deer of Shinto shrines, from Indigenous spirit teachings to Arctic reindeer—he operates as a trans-cultural symbol. In choosing him, I adopt an animal form that exceeds borders and specific cultural claims.

In becoming him, I follow a fundamental human impulse: the desire to belong. Embodiment becomes a strategy not for impersonation but for transformation—one that allows me to engage with otherness, without appropriating any particular human identity.

The familiar act of posing for a photograph becomes a site of paradox: concealment and revelation overlap. The gesture enables me to explore the permeable boundary between self and other, human and animal, reality and imagination. I want the resulting images to sustain ambiguity—inviting interpretation while resisting decoding.