Current Work

Current Work

The following are two videos in a series of work dealing with issues of truth, performance and affect. Through the translation of text, including movie scripts and personal memoirs, actors and actresses re-enact various scenes often in the form of storytelling. The subjects in "Sex, Lies and Videotape: The Script" repeatedly act out a single scene. Each performance is subtly different resulting in a questionable idea of success and character embodiment. "The White Album," however, exhibits a seemingly endless narrative in which numerous stories intertwine and connect on the most basic of levels, such as single words, emotions, and content.

The White Album

The White Album

HD video projection

10 min 12 sec

Sex, Lies, and Videotape: The Script (working title)

Sex, Lies and Videotape: The Script (working title)

HD video projection

12 min 22 sec

also, see archival writing section (on the right side of the page) for writing project.

images from current photo project. description will come later.

18 in x 16 inUntitled (1922)

inkjet archival print

Untitled (1922)

18 in x 16 in

inkjet archival print

Problem of

[representation]

experience is intangible.

Here is a link to a super short clip of my video The White Album

http://vimeo.com/channels/overthewall#20727489

Catherine Lord

I recently read an amazing article by Catherine Lord titled The Art of Losing. It was a beautiful, detailed description of the relationship between Lord and her ex-lover. The material was based on photographs taken by and/or of the couple.

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Flower alert, we used to say on walks around the neighborhood or in the country, a signal to look, to cradle, to inhale. A code, our code. We don’t bother to learn their names, preferring to discuss each particular instance of sexual delirium in the language we already speak. A bee landing on the broad lower lip of a foxglove, fumbling inside, staggering back drunk, sticky, legs breaded with yellow. The entire thorned roundness of a barrel cactus swelling dark red among the rocks, prophecy of eruption. The cream throat of a burgundy daylily, the green veined shaft of an amaryllis, sweet wet cupped in the hollows of heliconia. Hummingbirds suspended, thrumming for the perfect pitch to lick nectar from deep violet mouths, moths groping in the dark for honey suckle, white fingers laced in the beard of blue iris, the magnificent pornography of orchids.

Just some background information on Lord: she is an artist, writer, professor, and scholar, whose challenging photography and writing explores feminist, queer, colonial, and cultural themes though language and image (http://alumni.harvard.edu/stories/catherine-lord-70-recieves-harvard-arts-medal).

The Art of Losing, though never stated, and definitely not written in the likeness of, is a critical work. Although the majority of the article is filled with vivid visual writings (such as the passage I quoted above), we are subtly reminded of her thesis: that photography steals.

5

We want memories. We discard the present to gamble on a past. I operate the machinery of loss. You let me.

6

It could be an ad for one of those organizing systems that aim straight at the abject fear of the slovenly, but these are insurance photos, a simple inventory of the loot in your undeclared war against the rich, or the middle class, or anyone who had money to burn, no matter how provisionally or imprudently.

I will post later how the archive (as an impossible objective entity) is visible in my own work. For now, I want to leave you with more of Lord’s words:

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It is easier to remember your back thin against my cheek, or the sound of your car on the hill outside our house, than it is to endure these snapshots. I have carried them in a small black box to Lake Como, where a man invented photography because he envied his wife’s ability to draw. I arrange them across my desk. After I write out each one, I shut it back up, Pandora refiguring the odds.

Pseudo Documentary

I am in the workings of shooting for a new video.

The project started out with an interest in the emotional attachment to fact vs. fiction. In my first shoot, I video taped myself telling a story in the first person. The story was not my own, but a constructed narrative based off of the character Jenny from the award-winning 1994 film Forrest Gump. It came of as a documentary-style interview. As the story unraveled it became clear that the story I was telling was not my own. Even if the viewers could not associate the story with that specific film, it was obvious that it was a Hollywood story (due to the number and extremity of events discussed). I wanted the audience to question which character (me as an individual who was telling the world a personal story of hardship or me as a fictional character performing for entertainment purposes) they could, or wanted to, relate to more.

I did not feel that the one take was enough to get my idea across. Some people thought it was purely a live-journal sob story, others thought it was too obvious that I was reciting a fictional story, all which was mostly due to my lack of acting abilities. So, in my next take on this project, I hired actors and actress to tell stories.

Here is the e-mail with the project description I sent out:

This email is to give you all a brief description of my ideas for this project. If you are still interested after reading, just reply an email back with "i dig it," and we can talk about the project further. If you feel it is not for you, feel free to delete.

So, as I stated in the craigslist ad, I want this project to be a collaboration. I am a video artist, not a director of scripts, so the character you choose and the story you would like to tell is entirely up to you. I am not at all asking you to write a script, but to simply retell a story (or a single scene if you want) of a character that you are already familiar with. The more you don't remember and the more you improvise the better!

What I need from you guys are two 5 minute monologues:

1) The first monologue will be you giving a first-person account as a character from your chosen movie, tv show, newspaper article, etc. (For example: If you choose to tell Jenny's story from Forrest Gump, you may begin your monologue by recalling how Forrest punched some guy at the strip club you were working at and the time when he beat up your boyfriend who was yelling at you outside your dorm room, or you might explain the famous scene in which you ran into the corn fields and pray that God would turn you into a bird.. You can focus on one scene, or you can string together a bunch of scenes).

**You do not have to be correct in an exact depiction**. Tell the story as you remember the character to be.

This is more a project on subjective memory and fictional identities than it is on an accurate depiction of a known character.

2) The second monologue will be structured the same, except we will choose a communal movie. So all 5-6 actors/ actresses will be telling the same story but with different versions. In an additional e-mail we can figure out what movie we should choose!

The monologues will be filmed with you sitting in a chair as though you were being interviewed for a documentary.

Because there is no predetermined script, the structure of the project is likely to change again and again. As of now my idea for the first monologue is to combine all the footage I take of your multiple stories and thread them together to create a new fictional narrative. As for the second monologue, I am hoping to recreate an event that is entirely subjective.

I am not sure exactly how it is going to turn out, but that makes working on it together way more interesting.

So, my hopes for this revision is to really blur the lines between fact and fiction, to have the audience have to dig further into their memories to examine which is real and which is not and to then to further build a relationship with them based on that assessment. I am also interested in the new story that is created, a story that more closely resembles the confusion of actuality. A story of truth.

A manifesto (kind of)

or maybe it's an artist statement...

My painting is about what I can do with paint. It is about my position, in a rapid world, as a painter. A painter of objects. It is about my relationship with the canvas and the thing I am painting. It is about intimacy and time. It is about the act of painting. It is about a reduction of sorts, like a minimalist sculpture. It is about the object, the wooden box or the sales receipt, an eye glasses case, or junk mail, an empty crate of shipped fruit, it is about the paint. It is not about its subject. It is about the faded palette. A veil. It is about the inability to re-present the objects actuality. It is about what is outside the frame: failure, obsession, labor. It is about getting to know something, to note everything about it, like a list. It is about itself as a painting, a warped mirror.

note: this is going to be the first of many drafts, hopefully.