Loren Johnson
ARTIST

Choreographies of Undoing

#research #in-progress #video 

Research Summary

A personal and relational inquiry into embodiment, visibility, and the social construction of masculinity as lived through a cis male body. While the current phase of the work focuses on my own movement and experience, future iterations may include additional participants. The primary modes of research include poetry, prose, audio recordings, reflections on recorded movement, and potentially documentary-style interviews. The culmination of the research will take the form of an interactive multimedia presentation, available online and introduced through a live event featuring an artist talk and Q&A.

CIS Manimal 1 (April 2025)

Background

It began as a personal practice of self-filmed movement in the forest, often in solitude and often nude. What has emerged is a kind of inquiry into embodiment, visibility, and, perhaps most of all, a quiet refusal of the roles I’ve learned to inhabit as a cis man—a refusal because I very much wish to inhabit my body fully, not as a tool or a resource, but simply as a soft animal.

Is this visible? Is this coming through? (hearing static and high-pitched sounds of tuning a radio dial.)

I grew up off-grid in the Cascade Mountains, and as an adult, entering the forest always brings both a sense of refuge and of being returned to a younger place. In this way, I often feel more available for careful listening—to both my internal experience and the experience of my body in these less built worlds.

Nostrils flare, vision sharpens, and this feeling of attentiveness is both familiar and pleasurable—like coming home.

Introducing a camera into this space as my witness has been recent—and for me, vulnerable and curious.

I think what is happening in me is some kind of necessary gesture in a long journey of re-patterning or undoing. If the shapes and gestures of my body have been formed under the gaze of social projections onto a visibly cis man, then perhaps something in their undoing also wishes to be witnessed. Not for exposure or spectacle, nor even as protest—no. I think that I hope what accumulates in this work might succeed as a quiet offering to any of us asking questions with our bodies, and seeking the way back to our animal sense. 

This work is ongoing—tentative, embodied, and unfinished. For now, I’m still exploring, watching, listening, and filming. 

Questions guiding this inquiry

  • How has my movement—my gestures, posture, expression—been shaped by the social expectations placed on me as a cis man?

  • What becomes possible when I allow my body to move outside of those inherited roles and postures?

  • Can movement become a way of listening—of reconnecting internal sensation with outward form?

  • What happens when I bring a camera into that process? How does being witnessed, even by a future viewer, change the quality of attention?

  • How might solitary movement in the forest serve as both a personal ritual and a site for undoing learned patterns?

  • Is there something necessary about making this process visible—about returning the body, in its undoing, to the social field in which it was first shaped?

  • How might my subjective experience and working through of cis masculinity beneficially contribute to the larger conversations on gender, embodiment, transformation, and trans-sexuality?