Film

Intimate Materials

Content warning: this video contains recordings of explosions. It is not otherwise explicit or gratuitous.

Intimate Materials is an experimental audiovisual work about our intimate relationships with our memories and our pasts. Concrete images evoking American nostalgia are layered with abstract footage of copper wires, lights and painted walls to give a dream-like feel and to evoke memory. As we look past the lights and textures, we see children, a romantic couple, a playground, and finally a little girl looking through a window, covered in flickering red textures that sometimes evoke flames or tears.

This work about nostalgia questions the American Dream and honors people whose childhoods were dark and challenging.

This work was filmed using an iPhone 5C and historical footage. I take advantage of the failures of phone cameras from 2013, purposefully pushing the camera to record extremely zoomed in content in low light environments in order to create unusual effects. This work presents financially accessible filmmaking as a purposeful aesthetic that defamiliarizes imagery in the film.

Verklighet

Content warning: this video contains very brief but graphic historical video footage, a non-graphic but upsetting Holocaust photo, and nudity.

Verklighet is a work for amplified chamber ensemble, electronics, and visual media. It was originally performed live by the American Modern Ensemble and conductor Robert Paterson as part of the Composers NOW Festival in New York City.

The haunting music evokes unsettling emptiness that is interrupted by moments of inexplicable violence. This creepy work suggests a hopelessness and nihilism that is touched by tenderness in the last possible moment.

This work contains found material from Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and video artist Bill Viola, as well as demonstration videos from a German pyrotechnic producer called PyroProdukt. It also contains a quote from Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician (1957):

“One goes step by step, step by step into the darkness. The movement itself is the only truth.”