I rarely get out to galleries these days and often resort to Instagram for my visual fix. Like the internet itself, it’s a seemingly endless rabbit hole of memes, food porn, actual porn and hopeless narcissism. But occasionally some strange and inexplicable gems scroll on through, just waiting to be unpicked.

Last year a friend shared a video by a user going by the handle of @mcdazzler. In it, a woman donning an aquamarine circus leotard and thigh-high patent leather boots walks down a muddy slope toward a tree swing, mounts the swing, pulls some beads out of her vagina, twirls and falls spectacularly off the swing, rubs mud all over her face and body, spits at the camera, then urinates on herself all the while lip-synching Karen Dalton’s “Reason to Believe.” I was hooked.

As the months passed I experienced more and more of her brazenly wrought characters, often in disheveled and filthy states of undress that would make John Waters blush. She performs dance routines in the parking lots and aisles of Home Depot and usually has some form of hideous ooze spewing from her mouth. To celebrate the holidays she recently posted a series of herself in absurdly infelicitous outfits sitting on the laps of various Mall Santas in the greater Los Angeles area. You know, art. I slid into her DMs requesting an interview and, surprisingly, she agreed.

Behind the @mcdazzler handle is Alicia McDaid, a self-proclaimed “disgusting feminist” who has been making confessional, character-driven performance art since the late ’90s. After a stint at Smith College and some time in London she ended up in Portland. While working as a traveling puppeteer touring the Pacific Northwest states she found herself lonely and unhappy, and with a friend’s camcorder embarked on a series of videos where she simply cried on camera or performed monologues in character.

In 2003 she compiled her videos and showed them publicly for the first time. She was surprised that people liked them and kept at it. In 2009 she mounted a photo show at Portland State University titled “Pain Is Fear Leaving Your Body” and even received a Whitney Biennial studio visit, but nothing came of it.

While in Portland McDaid bounced from job to job. She drove a cab, toiled in advertising, and worked as a scenic painter at Laika animation studios while supporting her husband as he navigated a career change. In 2011 they relocated to New York but the marriage proved abusive; a few years later she arrived in Los Angeles, divorced and 40, looking to build a new community. “Instagram helped me get out of the marriage,” she says, reflecting on that turbulent time. She dove in and uploaded video after video, creating an entire bizarro world for her alter egos to inhabit. “After my divorce I’m doing whatever I want. I’m a radical feminist and I’m disgusting and smart and nice and I cry a lot. Five hundred to 700 people a day watch my stories. It’s been great for my practice. I treat it like a sketchbook.”

Due to her “radical self-objectification” she’s had her account taken down and been shadow banned. It seems McDaid’s version of femininity is just too much for the ZuckerBots. She even got kicked off Tinder! (She doesn’t know why.) “My Instagram is a reaction to being hyper-sexualized through dating apps. You want to see my tits? Well, I’m gonna spit black shit all over them.” She feels conflicted about her relationship to the platform but shrugs, “I’m too far in to turn back now.”

She admits her work has painted her into a corner. “People think I’m crazy. I don’t get jobs anymore.” She’s managed to get by cleaning Airbnb units but when she felt the undeniable urge to shoot a video of herself in a friend’s unit, it nearly cost her that gig—the friend busted her.

Nonetheless McDaid perseveres. She’s part of the performance art supergroup Future Ladies of Wrestling and has performed on the Gong Show and at Coachella. She recently debuted her first one-woman show, Everything Is Nothing And Nothing Is Everything, at Pieter Performance Space acting as seven distinct characters, including a bit where she impersonates Martha Stewart re-creating Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present.

McDaid is planning a performance tour of the coasts and just released a new video, shot in the house of her friend who is a hoarder. But if you really want to dive into her daily universe of the grotesque, just press follow.

Instagram posts by McDaid.