I’M FULL OF MYSELF is a period piece located in the televisual era in the year 1992. Life coaching first appeared in the pre-digital, analog period of the late 1980s and early 1990s in response to a rapidly developing technological society and a resulting social anxiety. For this project, I created and performed an emerging life coach character who exists in a moment of time when the therapist-for-television was popularized. My character parodies the archetype of the life coach as a smiling and persuasive individual; a correlation of life coach to the modern televangelist isn’t a big leap with their shared similarities.

My art practice has evolved into a universe of characters and personas that are interconnected and in conversation with each other in an elaborate ‘lifestyle theatre’. The characters are torn between the lives they live and the lives they wish they were living and the gap between the two is the one the life coach seeks to fill. Enter the life coach, a facilitator with a message of personal power that reaching happiness and the good life are possible. This “gap” also describes my experience as a person, and thus, my work employs a synthesis of autobiographical experiences and fictional content based on my observations of the pursuit of pursuits. My life coach character, Evan Tyler, is my most potent attempt in defining this synthesis and a living personification of the “life gap”. Paradoxically, like many life coaches, his underlying motivation is his own existential dilemma.