Cross Pollination Iteration II (2016, 1:48, hand processed Super 8 and VHS)
Star Spangled Banner (2016, 5:12, VHS)
“Information is in a way the opposite of garbage, although in our contemporary commercialized world they may at times appear identical. Both are products of man-made processes, and, with the exception of a few crazy artists now, and some archeologists far in the future, we can generally say that garbage loses value over time, while information seems to be the process of something gaining value over time. As a rule, information is something to preserve, garbage is something to be destroyed. However, both can be looked on as a kind of waste product, a physical border, and for contemporary society both are among the most pressing problems of the day. An ancient Sufi saying states that a heavy load of broken pottery and a heavy load of books is the same for the donkey. Consider for a moment the total amount of books, magazine and newspaper articles, radio and television programs, records, videotapes, and films produced in one week alone it becomes clear that the major trick of today not information production, but information management.
In this light, the main problem for artists using video these days is in deciding what not to record. Making a videotape then might not be so much the creation or building up of something, but more like the cutting or carving away of everything else until only a specific thing remains.
Video archives as a sort of magnetic city dump — they certainly are almost as much of a bother to maintain. I liked the idea of garbage pickers as intellectuals, of a culture’s shit being the key archeological prize to revealing who they are, and of the possibility that in our uncertain future it will most likely only be those die-hard survivors, the cockroaches, who will be left to go through our trash. Someone once told me how they thought it was interesting that the past and history was so connected to the earth, to dirt and rock, that we speak of layers of history or strata, and how this is reflected in our terminology “down through history and up through evolution.” It made me thinking of digging in the dirt when I was a kid.”
- Bill Viola, “History, 10 Years, and the Dreamtime”
Rust Belt (2016, 26:05, documentary, 16mm)
Rust Belt, inspired by the minimalist and structural cinema of Chantal Akerman and James Benning, is a document of industrial decay in the United States, represented through locations in upstate New York. Shot on expired 16mm film as another representation of the loss of materiality and industry within this country, Rust Belt allows the grain of the material to become the focus of the piece. As the 27 minute piece progresses, the grain slowly becomes more dense, eventually obfuscating the entire image, rendering everything but the grain unintelligible wherein the locations and the medium die a symbolic death.
Shooting on expired film was an important choice in that most manufacturer's of film have gone out of business in the exact decline of industry that our film focuses on. The remaining expired film, like the locations in the film, is weathered and textured in unexpected, beautiful ways.
How Memory Works (2016, 4:50, VHS)
An experiment in flicker and sound. An ode to Tony Conrad, Martin Arnold, Peter Tscherkassky, and many others.
21 Years and 816 Miles (2016, 6:30, 2 channel installation)
Approximately 21 years after my family moved into our house in Chicago my brother searches for an apartment in Brooklyn, unaware of a strikingly similar video my father made while touring our house for the first time.
Left video's sound was mixed to the left channel and right video's sound mixed to the right channel. Headphones recommended for viewing.