Single channel video, running time 11'55"

"Between death and," a video collaboration with Catherine Borg, is an exploration of a funeral parlor in the center of Baltimore City on the precipice of its own transition.  The film is a meditation on crossing boundaries—the liminal states embedded in life, death, and grief.

The video is unique for the range of image capturing technologies used to describe the condition of the building and to convey to the emotional nature of the subject.  This is also true of the score by sound artist Jason Sloan which was generated by recording sounds emanating from the building’s internal structure and objects found in the former funeral home.

A country’s landscape and identity are inextricably linked together.  The incredible geographical diversity found in the United States continues to be an ongoing subject for artists and storytellers.  Like mounds and pyramids, cemeteries are part of a larger story narrating the impact humans continue to have on the land.

Scrolling through countless maps on Google, mile by mile, I discovered that every state in the contiguous US has at least one cemetery situated on or near a state line.  This realization was critical in providing a focus to this ongoing project.  I like to think of Relative Time as a kind of national survey of these border cemeteries.  More than a straightforward typology of cemeteries, the photographs reflect my varied responses to the details found in each cemetery and the site’s relation to the greater environment. (to be continued in Part 2)

Like a surveyor, my tripod is grounded in the cemetery with the camera lens directed towards the neighboring state.  Adopting this position was critical in thinking about the invisible line that divides swaths of land into separate states.  Although there may be considerable political divisions between states, the landscape is generally contiguous, a large plot of land that we all share. (to be continued in Part 3)

My survey has taken me to some of the most remote parts of the country over the past decade.  Without Google Maps my project would have been an impossible undertaking.  Access to these maps is a game changer when it comes to previewing a particular site and plotting a route.  In turn, our knowledge of a place has been altered by these satellite images. (to be continued in Part 4)

When editing the pictures from this series, I think about the images depicting the western landscape by 19thC photographers such as William Henry Jackson, Carleton Watkins, and others.  For these explorers, it was impossible to predict what laid beyond the mountain looming in front of them.  Nearly two hundred years later, my survey of the American landscape depicts more quotidian occurrences.  Fences not only demarcate the boundary of the cemetery but further divide the land for agriculture, housing, and roads.  Sequencing the photographs according to season is another way of noting the passage of time.  The annual flow of seasons is disrupted by an occasional passing vehicle that punctuates the stillness of the photograph.

Landscape After Battle, a video collaboration between sound artist Jason Sloan and myself, re-imagines Gettysburg National Military Park not only as a place of great historical significance.  It also situates the site in the present day by exploring the acoustic ecology of the park through sound and images.  The use of audio, video and still photographs forges an intimate relationship between the geology of the landscape, the historical battle, and the present which includes the flora, fauna, and visitors.  In short, Landscape After Battle is a poetic meditation on the tension between deep time and recent history, between people and a landscape.

Single channel video, running time 13'51"

Using animated black and white photographs with sound, Memory Foam depicts an imaginary dwelling that is a composite of views assembled from 26 different homes.  The soundtrack, composed by Jason Sloan, is drawn from audio recordings of the sound generated by the electromagnetic field unique to each light source depicted in the video.

For most of us, “home” connotes an intimate space and, as such, may be thought of as a reflection of the self.  The video attempts to blur the boundary between the individual and the world through shared experiences as evidenced, for instance, in the overlapping infrastructure collaged from several basements or the ubiquitous framed photographs of family and friends that appear throughout the video.  Animals and plants thrive in this house, too.  Clock faces serve as pauses or intervals between groups of images.  The presence of digital technology explores how our personal environment is increasingly mediated and monitored by technology.

Memory Foam is a unique way of investigating the interface between still imagery, animation, and sound.  Throughout the film, light and sound are the connecting threads as the camera makes its way from the basement foundation to the attic eaves, highlighting details of domestic life and love along the way.