Lack Loop is an iterative, continuous project with discrete physical manifestations. It is a series of looping films, research, stories, dreams, and theories I started working with in 2021. They have found home in installations, multimedia essays, and standalone films. Pictured here in a 7 channel version installed at Public Works Administration in NYC.

The project is an optimistic attempt to apply materialism to psychoanalysis and to not redeem, but rather completely transform the deconstructed humanist subject into something that, while possibly still limited in material agency, can act congruent to ethical desire to transgress the big Other (hegemonic order of neoliberal capitalism) for the sake of the other (a glimmer of the Thing echoed in mundane objects or others) and through this develop a creative, technical imagination. In this process, I hope to tease out and at times embody tensions in contemporary thought that may no longer serve our contemporary moment, while creating an aesthetic environment that gestures towards alternatives.

Installation, Dimensions variable, 16mm film loop, projector, 2 nylon flags with flagpoles 

An installation including two flags and a 16mm loop of the film I shot on a bolex at the capitol building on January 6th, 2021 as protesters assembled and rioted against what they saw as a stolen election.

Alongside the footage are two flags depicting 3D scans of classical Roman sculptures depicting Talia and Melepone, mythic figures in ancient Greece referred to as the muses of tragedy and comedy. By printing back out these virtual renders alongside the physical film, I am mimicking the devirtualization process that I see as a pivotal component of the events on The 6th as decentralized online politics and organizing entered the physical world. The figures, shown holding masks, are the origins of the still common dual mask symbols used to represent theater’s, sock and buskin. Text on the flags, formatted with “top text/bottom text” impact font (standard meme format), states the title of the work. The language comes from a slight alteration of Karl Marx’s famous correction of Hegel in Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, writing, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” The final word is changed to LARP, an abbreviation for Live Action Role Play. The film and the flags become unified upon reaching the final shot, or loop point, where I show a statue installed on the neoclassical American capitol, creating a triptych with the two classical statues.

I have this image in my mind that briefly appears in the film where the “insurrectionists” are advancing up the steps of the Capitol, every so often breaking the line of police and gaining ground. However, with each advancement, rather than charging forward and using the momentum, they stop and wait and look at their phones, or hang flags with images of Donald Trump photoshopped onto Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, until they can take another step forward. Then the “insurrectionists” get past the police, they make it all the way inside of the Capitol, and then what? They don't start issuing arrests. They don't write a new constitution. They don't perform the actual coup. All they can do is roleplay. All they can do is take a selfie. All they can do is generate images.

81 Slides, TRT 9m12s

Carousel No. 1 (Desire Is Structured Like A Montage), is the first public showing of a series of 35mm slide show films I’ve been making. It’s a collection of 81 35mm slides housed in a looping carousel projector. Like the internet, the unconscious exists in a non-physical space, and using film allows me to materialize both the images and projector’s cycling process. Then the looping projector can become the unconscious, driven to repeat and circle its desires, with no clear beginning or end. The content (film slides) is sourced three separate ways. First, there are 35mm photos of friends and loved ones driving cars, nude in bed, or browsing the web alongside close up shots of teeth. These images construct my physical, lived, and more conscious life. Second, slides I sourced from craigslist, yard sales, and random lots from eBay inject the outside world. Finally, digital images ripped from the internet and collages exposed onto celluloid introduce my virtual life and fantasies alongside screenshots grabbed online. In a 1973 seminar, Lacan stated, “the montage of the drive is a montage which, first, is presented as having neither head nor tail.” Such a description of drive lends itself to a circular presentation of images exploring drive, with no beginning other than the one asserted by the viewer entering the space. By using myself or close friends as characters, I can shoot these images with a quick turn around, almost the moment the idea comes to me. I try to do this before taking too much time to understand why I want to shoot them, rather I blurt them out the way a patient first brings a thought to analysis. I put these in conversation with other scenes or shots already in the work, analyze them, take notes, then go back and re-shoot new images.

August 11th, 2023 filmmaker and Dogma95 creator Lars Von Trier posted a video seeking applications for a, "female girlfriend/muse." Later that week I went to my neighbor Rose, my 75 year old muse (not girlfriend), and filmed an application. Lars has yet to respond. 

TRT 5m34s

A self portrait with the self cut out, rendered only as a reflection: mirror.

A techno-utopian chariot calmly pilots a dystopian hellscape: drive.

There isn't a 4th wall left to break: look.

Seen installed on 3 channels at Public Works Association Homecoming, November 2023

2 channel 16mm, trt 2m

A simple gestural work on 16mm, something like a lyrical sketch exploring the transitory nature of things and time passing. It also maps out a space and view: our porch where queer women on my block from many generations gather to smoke cigarettes and drink. It’s an especially popular spot when the cherry blossoms bloom. The work features two digitized channels of 16mm film displayed on one large monitor. On the top we see my neighbor Rose surrounded by slowly fluttering petals. On the bottom, my roommate Phoebe and the rain storm that knocked the final flowers off the tree and washed the petals away. 

Transformers: Terminal (2024) - 1h36m 

A film by Writer/Director Miles Engel-Hawbecker and Writer/Producer Tomi Faison, 

Aidan, an awkward fanboy, finally leaves his mother’s basement and goes to meet Sierra, a vlogger fresh off a break up who needs help filming a new video series at Comic-Con. They struggle to navigate the newly devirtualized relationship, and just as they’re starting to figure it out, disaster strikes. Further alienated and unable to cope, Aidan descends into nightmares, becoming a monstrous toy as he dawns Sierra's internet identity and forges on to Comic-Con to complete the video series.

A 3 part exhibition unfolding over the course of 2019 at the Frederick Arts Council Gallery in Frederick, MD. Featuring a film and installation for each part

Act I, single channel digital video, 23m24s

Act II, 4 channel digital video installed on 32" synchronized monitors, 14m25s

Act III, single channel 4k scan of super 8mm & digital video, 4m40s

Phase Change is a living, evolving installation; a three Act visual story of disaster, transformation, and becoming. The work uses water, steam, and ice, articulated through video, sculpture, and music, as a jumping off point to examine a collective consciousness in crisis and posit a path forward. This site specific project was conceived specifically for a twelve month exhibition with each Act unfolding over the course of four months. The sculpture (illustrated above) remains consistent throughout the exhibition, but manifests differently in each Act as a new assemblage of bricks, taken from demolished homes. These formations, and the transitions between them, guide the viewer. Liquid evaporating to gas, a city turning to moss, a child rebuilding--examining these processes of change provides insight into the creative force of difference as we work towards not just individual transformation but transformation as the collective.

Co-founder and Director of Audio/Visual Programing

Do Not Research. DNR is a multi-faceted project founded in 2020. It is foremost an online publication, currently hosted via Substack. The blog has published twice a week for the past 2 years and includes the work of over 200 unique contributors. The digital publication is largely fed by an online chatroom hosted on Discord, which is active 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In addition to its internet presence, Do Not Research has also mounted physical exhibitions, sold out film screenings, numerous book launches, and much more.

In April of 2022, just over a year since the founding of the blog, Do Not Research devirtualized into its first IRL physical exhibition at Lower Cavity in Holyoke, MA, a non-profit art space run by Anthony Discenza, also a contributor to the blog. The sprawling, museum-scale exhibition included 47 works by 42 international artists. Later that summer, we launched the first Do Not Research book, 2021-2022, at the New Museum in New York City, in collaboration with Rhizome. The massive 412 page anthology included all text contributions to the blog and stands as a physical record of the online world we inhabit.

In the last year we’ve had an accomplished roster of contributors, including many mid-career artists from a variety of backgrounds. Primarily, the attraction to Do Not Research is our willingness to thoughtfully engage with topics that we see discussed online but are not represented elsewhere in the art world. The internet is transforming the political field and our cultural institutions have been painfully slow in responding to this seismic shift. Secondly, with the incredible increase to the cost of living in all major cities across the advanced world, there are increasingly few organizations who are willing to take the creative and financial risk to platform new talent. Do Not Research exists to platform work that is relevant, urgent or otherwise excluded from today’s institutions. The organization has thus far functioned like a peer-to-peer school for artists or an alternative education program to supplement, or replace, the dysfunctional structure of American MFA’s. Yancey Strickler, has described Do Not Research as the early stages of a new form of 21st century institution, mirroring the universities and guilds of eras past.

Taking place at SARA’S over Labor Day weekend, Scrap Yard Screenings was a free, pop-up, three-screen, moving image festival organized by artist Tomi Faison.

Three Shorts Blocks, co-curated by artist Filip Kostic, put into conversation multiple generations of artists exploring ideas around networked culture, mediated images, and technology.

Mid-length and feature films included everything from the world premiere of a documentary on parasocial fashion-week photographers, to a transcendental black metal opera, to a re-make of Chris Marker’s San Soleil (1983) constructed collectively by over 40 artists and meme admins. All united in their boldness and vanguard spirit.

In between blocks of programming, Scrap Yard Screenings will hosted selections from the archive of utopian-pirate, public-access, live-streaming project QuaranTV which streamed non-stop for the first two thousand hours of the pandemic. Curated by founding collective member Kayla Drzewicki.

Scrap Yard Screenings used three projectors, playing all films on three screens in the same room at the same time and featured couches for seating.