These zoetropes were created as part of a workshop during the 3rd Annual ILSSA Group Residency at North Mountain in Hedgesville, West Virginia.  Collaborators each spent the day learning about the animation process and building their own zoetropes, and I then filmed the resulting devices and set it to a song sung by fellow residents Stina Soderling and Tristan Gordon.

Created a month before the 2016 US Presidential Election, Every Single Inch of Ground is a pixilation animation based on Susan B. Anthony’s remarks on the importance of ancestral women in gaining the freedoms and privileges of present-day women. To acknowledge this gained ground, as well as express a more inclusive solidarity, I chose to invite men and women to mark every inch on which we stood. It was photographed in a single day by way of a twelve-hour dolly shot with participants standing along the path from the middle of Mt. Hope Cemetery to where Anthony is interred.

Labor of Love (Mutoscope) is a sculptural animated loop inspired by vintage animation devices found in late 19th century arcades. The title of the piece references, in part, the process of creation. In order to build the machine by hand, I had to learn, among other things, how to weld, an act of reclamation that held great relevance as the animation inside (hand-drawn digitally before being printed and die-cut) depicts the dissolution of an artistic partnership and the consequent loss of access to particular skills. Along with the design of the machine itself, I designed and built several prototypes for the mechanism to hold the individual animated frames.  More information on the making of this animation reel can be found here. The decision to design and build a functioning machine by hand contributed to artistic and emotional growth and ultimately catharsis, the project taking over three years to complete.

This collaborative contribution to the Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts (ILSSA) Frameworks project focused on the themes of:

Questions, Attention, Alternatives, Risk, Pace, Embodiment

Handwork, Routine, Care, Community and Environment.

Utilizing single frames from my VR film Swing, poet David Yockel Jr. selected and hand-traced with carbon paper eleven drawings from the film, writing six-word, ekphrastic poems for each, which were then hand-lettered and carbon traced by me onto the same page.

Tired Tongues is a replacement-animated film consisting of over five hundred individual Pollack Flavor Co. stickers originally found in a dumpster and re-purposed as animation “frames.” All the lettering was hand-drawn using a light table and traditional straight-ahead technique. Based on two tankas (a Japanese poetic form) written by David Yockel Jr. on the theme of self-censorship, the film follows the poem through Brooklyn, NY where the words became a temporary part of the landscape, removed after each photo was taken.