I experiment in film and video, drawing on investigations in identity and representation. In a
recent video, Havana (2008), I play a documentary filmmaker and present as a clown in a small Illinois town. In a very personal video, Discourse on the Social Body (2007), I recount my struggles to come to terms with my own social responsibilities in the face of extreme social injustice, threading events in my own life amongst testimonies on torture and capital punishment. In another recent video, Mound 72 (2007), I juxtapose an archaeological site of human sacrifice with a town of importance to Black radical history and an earthwork by the artist Michael Heizer, all of which are within a day’s drive, implicitly asking how we choose what to preserve.
In broad overview, my animation work between 1998 and 2001 drew on philosophical concepts acquired in doctoral studies and bore titles like Truth and Time & Object. To complete my MFA in media arts I directed an experimental drama, taking shot cues from early uses of videotape in self-help contexts and scripting ideas from case studies in the early literature of psychoanalysis. For several years I embraced a low-tech video aesthetic, producing a series of very personal journal entries. Recent research focuses on explorations of performance modes for the camera, drawing on the history of experimental theater and contemporary performance art.
Over the past ten years I have screened work at such international venues as the Ottawa International Animation Festival, the Black Maria Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Cinematexas, the New York Underground Film Festival, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival, to name a few. My animation has been awarded for technique by the Eastern Division of ASIFA, a national animation organization, and received an Honorable Mention at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. My dramatic film was awarded by Sarah Lawrence College’s experimental film festival, and a video of mine received the “Best Video” award at a members’ show of CEPA Gallery in Buffalo. As a rule, the films have been constructed for festival projection whereas the videos have been prepared for gallery shows in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Atlanta, and Malaysia.
