BUT THE RAIN / IS FULL OF GHOSTS TONIGHT (VIDEO STILL)
Elements of chance and timing are metaphorically depicted in a performative video work, where after given specific instructions, depending on how people behave before the camera, strangers may or may not "kiss", once the video work is combined. Meditating on desire in our digital age, this piece questions the roles of chance and timing in relationships.
Musical Score, Patrick Yerby
THE BLUE OF DISTANCE (VIDEO STILL)
Collected from the internet, the blue sky depicted in media images from September 11th has been cropped and pulled from each photograph and then interlaced into a video work and still photographs. This piece was created while in flight.
EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY (SLEEP STUDY, VIDEO STILL)
Meditating on loss and the passage of time, interlaced and layered translucent slow-motion ghostlike images create this video work made from photographs of the way bedsheets lay each morning for the days and months following a breakup.
BLACK PAINTINGS
The Black Paintings alludes to a group of fourteen murals painted by Francisco Goya on the walls of his home, most likely between 1819 and 1823. The collection of murals are referred to as The Black Paintings, or Pinturas Negras in Spanish, because of their dark near prophetic themes. The murals depict an intensely bleak and nightmarish outlook on mankind, an eerie and awful resonance with our modern world. The Black Paintings here represent the fourteen shootings in the United States that have had the largest death tolls. Each image was chosen by its google ranking, appearing first when searching for each event. The color of the image was then averaged. Each flash represents each life lost.
This is the first iteration of this work.
www.theblackpaintings.com
PANSY (VIDEO STILL)
A reversed and inverted high definition slow motion video piece reveals delicate flowers being pounded by a storm, then regaining their strength and color as they repel the onslaught of pummeling raindrops.
ALONE, TOGETHER
Stolen from live public webcams, core emotions are depicted in this collection of portraits of modern life. In the 20th century, psychologist Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and Robert Plutchik eight, which he grouped into four pairs of polar opposites (joy-sadness, anger-fear, trust-distrust, surprise-anticipation).
ART FORUM BERLIN, MEDIA AND PRESS LOUNGE
Installation in ArtForum Berlin’s Media and Press lounge. The circular tubing sculptures, and their humming pumping motors, produce a harmonic labyrinthine landscape of forms. The video projection, the inversion of the rain and flowers, produces a feeling of looking at a reflection, as if quietly gazing at the mirror image of rain on flowers at the edge of a dark pond.
JAWBREAKER
Exploring the diminishing and increasing physical and metaphorical space in relationships, this video work documents an eight and a half hour performance of a couple collaboratively eating an entire jawbreaker candy. The resulting video has been interlaced and extended. Once sweet, as the candy is consumed both participants become increasingly sickened by the sweetness and the endurance it takes to keep the sweet candy suspended between them. This piece investigates time, patience and endurance with regards to intimacy.
JAWBREAKER (VIDEO STILL)
GOLD (DETAIL)
A study chronicling the passage of time, the way the color of one’s urine changes throughout the days and weeks is documented and portrayed in a format and scale which from afar looks like a grid of gradations of yellows and whites, a simple minimalist color study. When closely observed, however, the images become highly recognizable and exposes a record of the passage of time that often goes unnoticed.
DRIPPING (VIDEO STILLS)
Eggs being emptied of their insides is revealed in a cropped and edited video work, dissolving a mundane action into pure line, color and form.
DOUBLE BUBBLE (VIDEO STILLS)
Two people stand close, blowing bubbles. As the bubbles lose their sugar through mastication, they grow larger, sometimes pressing against the bubble of the other, sometimes building a bridge. As time progresses, the bubbles begin to intertwine. The bubbles in this work serve as a metaphor for language, symbolically exploring patterns of communication.
TRUST FALLS (VIDEO STILL)
Harnessed with a video camera to capture the changing facial expression of each participant as they perform a trust fall into the arms of their friends, this slow motion video work captures minute and ever fleeting emotions as the expressions of the participants morph from excitement, to fear, to relief, and then joy. By slowing down real time, we are able to gain access to normally imperceptable facial contortions.
BOBBING FOR APPLES (VIDEO STILLS)
Two people locked into an apparatus become a unit where breath for one person is made possible only at the expense of the other's submersion under water. The children’s game of bobbing for apples is transformed into a question about self-preservation versus self-sacrifice, compassion versus selfishness, trust versus fear in relationships.
TUESDAY I BECOME CLOUDS
Collected from internet images and cropped, the blue sky depicted in media images from September 11th, has been die-cut and laid out in large cloud-like piles. Each viewer is invited to take a piece of the sky with them, thereby dispersing and shifting the sculpture over time, until it eventually disappears.