what happened? (artist statement)

For my final video and sound project I wanted to document the near death experiences of my friends and acquaintances and explore the way these events impacted their day to day lives thereafter. I was interested in the withdrawn and passive tone with which many of the interviewees discussed their dramatic or traumatic experiences, and I found the the reoccurring tone of indifference and/or indestructibility both scary and inspiring. I chose to use the collage format because I thought that it best reflected the overwhelmed feeling I got when presented with so many powerful experiences.

Some issues that came to light in the process of stringing interviews together included the issue of sorting the material out and creating transitions between samples of video and sound, a problem I solved by creating "video haiku's" or sections of three video and sound samples which incorporated two near death experiences and one nature (spring) image. I chose the spring imagery to reinforce the idea of survival, or rebirth, and incorporated image of children and child-craft books to convey the idea of innocence, or innocence lost and to make a reference to the limits of storytelling, or art in general, to truly capture a moment.

we used to have a mountain

"The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest)."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

double click to go there

"When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

Double-Click To Go There






For my site-specific project I have a series of photographs of my grandmother’s childhood home taken from an image I discovered on GoogleMaps. (This is probably a violation of copy write laws.)

What I did was conceptually simple. I took a picture of her house on my computer screen, uploaded that image on to a computer, then photographed that image from the monitor, and uploaded that image on to the computer and repeated the process several times.

I was interested in the effect of camera lens on monitor, in the distortion that occurs in an image when these two media meet; how in the process of viewing, capturing, then reviewing and re-capturing the image changes- morphs from a nostalgic sunny day into a sort of digital nightmare.

For me, the pattern that emerges almost reads like a finger-print, evoking the idea of a crime scene investigation, like looking for clues somewhere after the fact. Also it reminds me of the patterns you find in wood that indicate that tree's age, or the ripples that occur when one body of water enters anohter.


Key Themes: Memory, Ownership, Longing, Nostalgia, Copy Write

Project Two: Ready mades

Rest in Piece Die-anna? ohhhhhhhhhhh

Site specific installation ideas/themes

1. Avoid any radicalized identification with either clean or messy space. -Mooney, "Looking for History's huts"

2. Public transportation: See Die Hard III

3. Stone Soup

4. Noise (as wall), wall as noise

5. smokes: "would it be illegal if my weight were being supported by a train bridge?"

Communications