Charles Prigmore’s Swamp

Overview

In Charles Prigmore’s Swamp, I take on the titular character of Charles Prigmore: an emerging interdisciplinary artist who recently moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey to connect with his roots and start a new art gallery. Following in the footsteps of the late-1600s Prigmore colonizers, Charles Prigmore proudly furthers problems of gentrification in his city and cultural appropriation in general. Appropriation also exists on the level of the performance script itself, as I lifted the majority of its contents directly from interviews (e.g. Jordan Wolfson, Jill Medvedow), local news articles (early as 1854), essays (Danto’s “The Artworld”), song lyrics and more, sometimes in full-paragraph chunks. The work uses the traditional podium/audience/projection lecture setup as a starting point, but quickly emerges as a work of theater dependent upon a wide range of edited/live media, including videos, websites and computer interfaces.