3 min | Super 8mm film footage edited to HD video
“Midnight, Houston” is a video poem that depicts, in mythic terms, a parent’s attempt to share with their child the beauties and depravities of the city of their nativity: Houston. A collaborative project with poet Nick Rattner, originally created for "Location: Houston Poetry+Film Collaboration", sponsored by Aurora Picture Show and Public Poetry for the 2022 REEL Poetry Festival. Music by Sherman Finch
A short short experimental video created while "sheltering in place" - when my sense of time felt distorted and irregular. Similar, I imagined, to an astronaut floating around in space. The videosketch is a playful stop-frame animation created from a 2D collage project, coupled with vintage audio and sound bytes from the NASA freeuse archives. The video plays a part in a larger body of work titled “Timescraps”.
I have an hour drive to my teaching job. Sometimes, I feel like the only chance to appreciate nature is when I am witnessing an astonishing sunset amidst an afternoon traffic jam or being blinded by sun glare on a morning drive to work. Over the past six years while commuting, I have been photographing the morning and late afternoon sun from my car window with my cell phone. “Our closest star shot from my car” explores the desire to connect with the natural world within the chaos of our busy contemporary life.
4 min. | single channel video
The Earth is Not a Spaceship is an experimental film that remixes vintage educational source footage collected by the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. A woman’s voice narrates the film, functioning as a type of mother nature character. The narration becomes haunting and robotic when coupled with glitchy film footage that has been re-recorded off of various electronic devices. The reworking of the footage presents new meaning at the intersection of abstraction, the digital sublime, and a potential dystopian future.
Created for “Mess With Texas”, co-presented by the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX
4 min. | super 8mm film transferred to HD video
Emmett Street is based on a poem about a female ghost who lives in an old house with two women. In this piece, the ghost becomes a metaphor for the fading analog film medium and an homage to the women who worked in the film industry in the early 20th century. Sample clip is from a re-edit of a 2005 film shot on Super8mm. The new version includes a re-working of the original content.
Poem by Rene Steinke
Audio by Sherman Finch
6:27 min. | single channel video
Created for “Mess With Texas”, co-presented by the Texas Archive of the Moving Image and the Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX.
Eyes On Texas remixes vintage film footage, highlighting common stereotypes about Texas and its history. Audio is used as the main source for this film, as a way to emphasize how these characterizations are deeply rooted in our cultural imagination.
Guest curator Peter Lucas invited a number of Texas artists to create new video works using vintage source footage collected by the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. The re-workings are creative intersections of past and present, bringing new life and new perspectives to regional media memory.
4:35 min. | single-channel video, credits: the aka collective
349 Utopia Drive is an ironic portrayal of suburbia and the conquest for the American dream home. The suburbs were created as a type of refuge from the hustle and bustle of city-life; affordable living that was safe, clean, and aesthetically pleasing. Just like anywhere/ anyplace, darker, more complicated realities lie hidden beneath the surface.