It is my desire to make movies that have the ability to operate in the seductive manner that a television show or commercial might while also exposing some of the problems inherent in this very language. I would like my work to simultaneously undercut and celebrate the falseness of video by mixing actors, sets and special effects with real surveillance footage; to confuse the viewer so that he or she cannot identify in which realm the work exists.
In my short movies I allow viewers to make certain decisions for themselves: to pick the ending of a movie, to see the edges of its sets or to understand how it was made and then decide whether or not to enter into its real and fantastical subject matter. This manner of working was heavily inspired by Raoul Eshelman’s essays on Performatism, or the end of Postmodernism in which he breaks down films like Run Lola Run and describes the manner in which artists, writers and directors deliberately use fiction to skirt around the dilemma of Postmodernism.
In addition to this, my work maintains a strange mixture of analogue and digital through the meshing and processing of printed photos that become three dimensional sets or props and through pixilated color alterations made both in editing and painting.
Inherent in my work is an escape of space, an exploration of the way in which people navigate or inhabit an urban landscape. Small, constricted spaces consistently find their way into my work in order to set up a framework for the psychology of the characters that appear on camera.
The narratives I employ often center on a single hero (usually female) who must struggle against architecture, machinery and technology for a singlehanded victory that is quite tentative. The protagonists in the videos are portrayed as underdogs who harness unexpected strengths that sometimes become evident and at other times remain underneath the surface of a deceptively innocent persona.
In addition to touching on a tension between reality and artifice, I am particularly interested in calling into question the narrow and often vacuous portrayal of female characters in movies and television. While the simple portrayal of women happens quite blatantly in popular culture, it is such a common occurrence that it merges into what many viewers accept as normative. For this reason I utilize symbols and tropes from popular culture in an attempt to draw attention to the ridiculousness of this situation.
I am greatly influenced by the movies of directors and producers as varied as Alexander Tarkovsky, Fritz Lang, Maya Deren, Ryan Trecartin and Walt Disney. I am quite critical (of course) of Disney movies, but I use and exploit their language quite often because I am fascinated by the power these movies have over young minds, particularly my own as a child.