My work has been presented by the Black Maria Film and Video Festival, Kassel Dokfest, CPH:DOX, Antimatter Film Festival, Images Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Rooftop Films and more. I have had work presented in solo shows at the Nightingale and Gallery X. My video work has also been included in multiple media journals, including The Journal of Short Film and INCITE! Journal of Experimental Media and Radical Aesthetics Issue # 2. I was awarded a 2010-2011 Princess Grace Award in Film and received my MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I am presently completing my MA in Visual and Critical Studies .
Threading together historical situations with imagined facts and truthful fictions, my interest lies in prodding the contours of representation itself, embodying an intimate perspective that complicates how moving and photographic images have been poised to authenticate or know the world. Drawn to irresolvable questions and irreducible structures, I brush my fingers through the coarseness of uncertainty rather than simply patting it on the head. The formats I use are often obsolete, outdated, or otherwise imperfect, producing a graininess that echoes the complexities and textures of the pasts that I engage. Memory’s faultiness is ripe for active forms of creative re-imagining, as I reconstitute time through a non-linear approach to historiography. In the gesture of weaving together archival materials and personal memories, they are re-created entirely, usurping the assumption that the past and its histories are simply waiting to be retrieved. I construct new narratives and create a space for associative, connotative play between footage or objects and their historical or emotional significances.
My single channel works chart haunted landscapes, unspoken journeys and unknown interior spaces. A personal, often female voice is the viewer's guide through ethnographic expeditions, interpersonal exchanges, and travel narratives that voyage through a host of images, voiceover, and text. Guided by my background in Cultural Studies, the I/eye of my movies is situated within the problematic it is exploring, living out its affects. By journeying into the possibilities and limits of knowledge, my works take responsibility for my own perspective. Each piece is self-reflexive, honest about its own limits and situatedness, while carving cracks through which the viewer might empathize, identify or piece together. These pieces orchestrate multiple voices to unravel the constructedness of testimony and inhabit the fictive dimension of history.
My recent practice is most animated by a fascination with my homeplace, the Florida Everglades. In dialogue with conceptual camera-based practices of the 60s and 70s, as well as archive-based practices, these newest installations ponder relationships between moving and still images, film and video, as well as the longings embedded in the preservation of images. Embodying tensions between loss and pleasure, poetry and violence, criticality and romanticism, my impulses are conflicting, but deeply tied to a tradition of "southern gothic" creative production in the U.S. embodied by writers like Carson McCullers: the romantic is suffused with the latent horrors of colonization and tourism in Florida. Overall, this work is bound up with an affinity for the filmic medium, the promises and failures of travel, the archive of the landscape, and an insistence on the value of intimacy as a guide through the wilderness of my own unknowingness.
