Samhain/All Soul's Day, 2013

The moment doesn't know what it wants to be. An intense and balmy Fall day, with notes of Spring and Summer both––holding symbols of possibility and renewal, yet on the day where darkness is present more than ever and the veils between here and there are at their thinnest. We are exactly halfway between the Fall equinox and Winter solistice. We are inbetween. Both literally and figuratively. It is noon, yet the color outside my window is closing on sunset. A funeral procession leaves the corner church. And the bell continues to ring. 

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'Ricochet'

'Ricochet' is a commissioned piece to accompany live music performance. Taking the form of a cinepoem, the work uses appropriated footage from the Prelinger archive to explore the haunting nature of our atomic legacy.

Watch 'Ricochet' here

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1000 Cranes

driving to and fro in silence these days, the familiar country landscape with its repetition moving by me in a peripheral blur.  the mounds, the radio tower, the hand-painted sign for honey, the terriers greeting the day.  i turned toward them to catch a glimpse at 60 miles per hour.  1000 cranes point the way, and the death card, while Latin guitar emanates from the room next door.

i float.  pluto enveloping me, saturn beneath, and uranus is the sky.

Between here and there...

...lies Fukushima

My piece for the Elon Faculty Biennial 'Art Kit' exhibition:

braille text, scrapbooking embellishments

Scrapbooking embellishments serve to adorn experiences “preserved” between the pages of ready-made scrapbooks: some moments from our past are made pretty, while others are implicitly erased.  In the piece “Between Here and There Lies Fukushima” these embellishments are poetically transformed into braille text on the gallery wall.

"Here" is vague, "there" is vague... where is Fukushima exactly?  The text metaphorically points to a kind of blindness and invisibility.

My work for the last year has examined the ongoing Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan, a result of the 2011 Tsunami.  I have sought to question and challenge the emotional distance and lack of awareness in the U.S. of this global tragedy, which has surpassed Chernobyl in gravity and scope.  The scrapbooking embellishments serve to ground the tragedy in the personal (we are interconnected after all).  Yet simultaneously, the foregrounded “sparkliness” and kitsch sentiment act also as a barrier, symbolically underscoring the challenge to emotional engagement with catastrophe.


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