RUSS.

I am not sure there are artists but I am certain there is art.

My art is lived. It is a study of the self in its universality. My body is the ground on which this research exists and persists. On it, I confront the realities of my being. It is dangerous. I engage the multiplicity of its facets—my desires, fears, histories, dreams—the ghosts, demons, and gods of my personal and appropriated mythologies. I become them to investigate their ontologies and contextualize their existence within me and the world. Some have been birthed as alter egos—manifestations of the multi-faceted consciousness. They are me and they are not me. They are everyone and no one. Performance is their disguise for validity and normalcy.

My performance engages notions of reality and questions authenticity through an instinctual form of channeling. It is theater and it is not theater. It is resigned to the fallibility of human perception. I embrace this obliviousness. In my ignorance, I initiate an experience of truth. I reinforce this experience with tangible signs. I fashion artifacts and build environments that recreate the worlds my alter egos and I inhabit—the universal narratives generated by a creative self-exploration.

I am Filipino. I am Cebuano. I am earthling. Like my country, I am an accumulation of multiple inherited and appropriated identities. My mother tongue is Cebuano. My brain operates in English. My body speaks for itself, I am most fluent with it. It is pure in its silence. I offer it to the world.

I wish to reconnect art with life and death. And connect all three of them back to meaning and in the process. Art must have meaning to the everyperson. I seek the everyhuman. My art is for everyone.

Russ Ligtas