I make nonlinear videos that are hybrids of narrative cinema/documentary and conceptual video art. Viewers are put into a mode of unraveling realism, what is authentic and what is artificial. This happens between the constructed image and the truth quality that the camera documents in front of it. By blending 3D animations, shot footage, found footage and voice overs, viewers cannot rely on the historicity of the medium. The process entails research, conversation, and subsequent shooting. I pick subjects that have a general popular knowledge and amplify minor narratives within it. Through this entangling process of categories, I challenge the viewer to navigate their own preconceptions of the material I am presenting. I reassess common understandings of clichéd objects, images, sites, narratives, or roles.
Statement:
Some Acts Around Rocks and Stones (Part 2), 35:18, 2023
This project is about the history of the naming of the tallest peak (Denali/Mount McKinley in Alaska) and the first national monument (Bear Lodge/ Devils Tower in Wyoming) in the United States. Using an histoire des mentalités approach, I interviewed various people and their relation to the sites. It quickly became clear that interviewees were more honest in their political opinion if I didn’t have a camera in front of their face. The absence of a camera seemingly eased anxieties about social repercussions in their communities, as well as the simple problem of how one “acts oneself” for the record.
So I turned the camera off and had unmediated conversations.
Both Denali/McKinley and Bear Lodge/Devils Tower are tourist destinations and have similar socio-political histories. Names for both sites were first given by the Indigenous peoples of each region, which were then supplanted by settler names given by gold prospectors. Restoring the Indigenous names to these sites has proved challenging, as a republican bureaucratic loophole between a clause in the United States Board on Geographic Names policies and procedures rulebook allows the United States congress to continuously delay renaming votes.
For me, this project is an attempt at understanding the various localized logics, socio-political narratives, ambiguities in legal frameworks, and images that exist in the popular cultural imaginary surrounding these sites. In some way, this project is an effort at
re-humanizing post-political demonization of the other.
Interference, 15:09, 2020
Interference, is about a worker who takes a break, flips a bucket and interacts with enigmatic, distorted, hybrid naturalistic images on his iPhone. The disparate images are as follows: A meandering voice over narrative describes the history of a hoax image (Loch Ness monster) and the empirical impenetrability the image produces. A pixelated image of Comet 67P taken via satellite the moment before it crashed into it is juxtaposed against a Hi-Res image of the comet. While the voice over describes the history of classifying comets from “The Great” comet of the year which reduced the wonder of the phenomena into a numerical system. A dissolve animation of the CAT Scan/X-ray visualization of the Pompeii boy ponders the many interpretations this form now takes while the voice over couples the old form of classifying comets is mapped onto recent localized climate catastrophes. A gesture that brings back importance to a phenomena that serialization depletes. Prosumer footage of a whale shark with an indeterminate filter/visualization/bioluminescence/hoax that tracks the god rays on its back as it fades into the depths of the gulf of Mexico. The video oscillates between the various materialities of specific images and points to the distortions that arise in the interpretation of its content. Analyzing these images inspired by the framework of Benjamin’s ‘Optical Unconscious’, the worker/editor interacts with the images that speak to the fluctuations between truth, systemization, misinformation and image as empirical evidence in our contemporary moment.
Some Acts Around Rocks and Stones (Part 1), 16:02, 2017
Some Acts Around Rocks and Stones (Part 1), is about the morphology of discourse around an artwork. It begins with found footage of Marcel Duchamp defending the conceptual legitimacy of an artwork. It is then followed by a sequence of word for word subtitles by an art dealer using his spiel of what a readymade is to sell an artwork. The latter part of the video focuses on an interview with an art historian. She wrote her master’s thesis on the public reaction to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and then has lived near and observed the jetty for 25 years. Cut amongst this dialogue is an artistic form of labor, in which I turn over the basalt rocks located in and around the Spiral Jetty. Does this change the work? What if you can’t tell because it’s a sculpture in the environment that is slowly changing? Through this unlimited inquiry with the historian and work itself, I bring back the experiential quality to an artwork that is mostly known through images.
Proximity + Priority, 13:35, 2015
Proximity + Priority, is about my attempt to sign up for New York City’s ‘Adopt-A-Trash-Basket’ program. This program in theory allows residents to watch over a city trash can and remove the plastic liner when the can is half full. Being told conflicting reasons about my inability to participate I decided to document the process of stripping the paint off a city trash can, artificially rusting it out and then re-painting it to its original state. Dead Horse Bay, a 19th century exposed landfill on the beach and Trump Links a repurposed golf course landfill are two city sites that are coupled together. Exposing and covering up, literally and metaphorically from the object to the site, the work talks about our socio-political relationship to climate change through waste. The trash can was eventually placed back on the street and picked up, reintegrating it back into circulation to rust out over time naturally.
Work from 2010-14: https://vimeo.com/user1562072