asher hartman

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

I'm a transgender visual artist, writer, director, and maker of live performances. My works combine strategies of theater and performance art to grapple with social and political issues in an era of chronic crisis. These works are dense, visual, poetic embodied texts, infused with clown and cringe humor, evidence of trance and psychic journeying, often set in engulfing installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and elicit strong feeling. I am the director and founder of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of visual artists, actors, and performance artists with whom I've created since 2010. I make theater in the art world as a way to move complex poetic and conceptual texts into life, to work through the viewer’s subconscious or disavowed feelings around violence, our violent feelings, because I think we are defended against ideas of being bad, exiled, unworthy, not part of the political party/home we attach to and thus we push away feelings at the root of our own personal violence, as well as our own power (ability to dominate), leaving that material untouched. Humor is a big part of my work, because it upsets, confuses, produces feelings that the viewer doesn’t always control. I started my work as a result of working in conventional theater, noticing, after a couple of decades, the impulse for the playwright to produce mild humanitarian products audiences will easily consume, validating our previously held beliefs. My works are often called absurdist or Surrealist. I...

Artwork