ARTIST'S STATEMENT (draft May 30, 2025)
As ShockTea Bubblegum, ancient cosmic psychedelic disco drag princess, we embody a nondualist, transdimensional perspective, engaging with ritual research creation and exhibition in a self-referential and reflective experience that transcends temporal and spatial limitations.
Our cosmic being persona enters the historical dimension from the ultimate dimension via the reification of the imaginary. We utilize wigs and headwear, costumery, puppets, masks, dolls, and other visual fixtures as mobile memory palaces, to bridge dimensions and reveal overlapping realms of experience. We aim to stay in character and engage in world-building with our audience, inspired by immersive theatrical experiences and Jungian creative play. Each performance is a manifestation of our spiritual journey, inviting audiences to explore themes of identity, emergence, and interconnectedness.
As cosmic beings, we are multiple, like facets of one light, each reflecting different aspects of the whole. Manifesting in a human body, we draw upon ecstatic, revelatory mystical experiences derived from practices of meditation, prayer, yoga, song, and dance to illuminate our path and inform our art, allowing us to channel the future.
The body of ShockTea’s work encompasses all publications, performances, recordings, communications, public appearances, and third party documentation of our spiritual explorations, forming our written, verbal, and visual manifesto. Ritual prayer, meditation, sutra, mantra, tantra, and self-created yantra serve as vital tools in our creative process and artistic production.
A system known as Perspectomics is revealed in the body of this work, describing the totality of “mind,” “self,” and “personality” as one, replacing these terms with the neologism, “Perspectome.” Through this fifth-dimensional lens, we also reveal “Cosmome,” the unfolding universe, where all beings and moments coexist as one. Our work encourages viewers to transcend their immediate realities, celebrating the interplay of thought as co-manifestations of a single consciousness, and the multitude of manifestations as expansions of one being.