I'm interested in confronting police brutality and police abuse of cracking down on street performers and street artists, but also in valorizing street art as legitimate performance within the artistic sphere, where it's so often conflated with pan-handling and begging and not "successful" art. I want to change laws around street performance.
Kalan SherrardI'm extremely critical. I don't consider myself a performance artist. I balk at the term performance art.
Kalan SherrardI do what I do because it seems to be critically missing in the world and I want to see it not-happen.
Kalan SherrardI also eschew the identity of "puppeteer" it is a concept that blurs the boundaries of discrete objects and persons. I do think Anarchist Nihilist Puppet Show is my day job.
Kalan Sherrard[Do you know] how it feels to be a clownish character? It's always complicated to imagine conveying yourself outside of your body. Inside myself I feel like this rich, complicated thing, and then I see representations of myself, especially in the media - and I think this is why it's troubling for me, because I feel so caricatured and flattened.
Kalan SherrardFrom my earliest youth I've been riddled with angst about the homogeneity of the world and have tried to do things to break it: attacking abercrombie & fitch in the mall with a plunger, posting strange statues made of garbage around my town, different kinds of interventions, parades and experiments. I've always cared a lot about difference.
Kalan SherrardPuppets and dolls are the gateways between human beings and objects. There are tons of cliches to spout about puppetry and animism, the primacy of the object, attacking anthropocentric worldviews, etc, and while there were always puppets around, I started working with them to deal with the times I knew I wouldn't be able to collaborate with other humans, to have a team.
Kalan Sherrard