artist statement
As I film, as I move in front of (and behind) the camera, as I cut, splice, and thread film, as I install, as I make, I am thinking about the landscape of the body: its curvatures, its ridges, its folds, its scars, its loops. Every part of my process is physical, small, analog, intimate. We crouch and crawl; we pour and agitate; we reach and turn; we extend and bend. We – film, projectors, screen, space, shadow, light, skin, spirits, human – explore the contours of our bodies and movements. Our bodies hyperextend, twist, bend out of shape, breaking form and convention. I cut the film by hand, carefully selecting points of severance. I stitch the film together, taping on both sides, until a new composite film emerges. I thread the film through the projector. The celluloid glides out, snakes up above the ceiling pipes. When the film snaps, I turn off the projectors, find the rupture, and suture it together. I restart the projectors at measured intervals until the film cycles through the space once again. These are minute choreographies.
I approach my work as a trained dancer: through the muscle memory of movement. I look at how the body expresses what it remembers in the viscera, through improvisation, and through that which is not choreographed or scored. Through works that emphasize bodily awareness, bodily inhabitance, and movement, I investigate how and where we sense our bodily selves in the presence (and absence) of other bodies. I work with in/tangible materials including celluloid film, projectors, projection surfaces, movement, darkness, light, and time to create layered, unstable gestures that are unfixed in form but residual in the body. With attention to the physical and psychic space of a room, a page, a screen, or a stage, my practice examines the unstable, mutable nature of memory through that which resides in, lingers in, inhabits the body. Through the production of porous, fluid encounters of variable dimension and duration, my practice refuses fixedness and permanence.
Central to my practice is a contending with the inevitability and necessity of decomposition and loss. I am obsessed with unearthing that which emerges (only) when we release our hold on accumulation, preservation, and certainty.