As a little girl, I had recurring dreams in which I would seduce a ghost to disarm it. I knew that through objectification I could minimize another’s power and maximize my own. By proactively objectifying myself, I could beat the perpetrator to it, and reclaim control.
One evening in 2010, feeling particularly depressed and overwhelmed by the sink of dishes that waxed like the moon, I picked up my point-and-shoot camera and took a photo of the pile. I took those pictures every day for a year. It was exhilarating to manipulate something sinister into an object of beauty, for in my state that is how powerful
the dishes had become.
Detritustrata is a collection of work inspired by the isolation of domesticity. The product of a quotidian, base, and cyclical task, doing the dishes, is objectified to show its beauty and value, exaggerate the illusion of its power to dominate, and dispel this illusion through confrontation. The work also alludes to life's refuse as a calendar, marking the rhythm of waste collected in the lives of people eating, growing and dying. Chosen from over 300 photographs of dirty dishes over one year, these markers are manifest in 100 plus snapshots that grow in size until they are larger than the viewer.

Color photographs: 4x6 inch prints, 11x15 inch prints, 5x7 foot prints

A performance and sound work, Careful explores a woman's daily balancing act. In a skirt and heels she navigates a 6 foot step ladder, precariously mounting and squeezing through it, placing her body in dangerous and quasi-pornographic positions. She is at once mother, bread winner, and handyman. Climbing a ladder to success or futility. She is accompanied by a litany of warnings, a comprehensive list of the caution labels in her home. She reaches the last rung without using her hands, collapses over the top, and revives herself, balancing on her hips like she is flying, pressed down by gravity yet soaring within the domestic/public spheres in which she navigates her life, in the drag that accompanies her personae. She slides inside, putting herself into painful and awkward poses, holding each as long as her body can tolerate. She exits, dragging across the floor, agonizingly slow, her arms outstretched over-head, knuckles scraping the ground. The audience is in the round, close enough to feel endangered but ready to pounce in to catch her.

I stand on one foot for an extended period of time; first on the toilet, then in the kitchen sink, the stove, the kitchen table, and the bed. The verticality of the shots with the leg disappearing into the top of the frame suggest the rest of the woman, massive and teetering. The premise is contrasting femme drag with the domestic. The thin roles we claim and act out are exposed and contradicted in the quotidian atmosphere.
I am both confined and inspired by my position within the containers of single parenthood, mental instability, relative poverty, gender roles, and the female body as object. I choose to look for the amusing parts of each condition and use them as source material.

I hoist myself onto the kitchen table, kitchen counter, and stove. I attempt to move around but am constrained by the tight and narrow space and my yellow hi heels. I was thinking about enclosed areas, discomfort, vulgarity, precariousness, awkwardness, absurdity, sexiness, and the opposite of sexy. Also, the multiple roles women play and the positions they place themselves in both physically, theoretically, and politically. The piece implies unadorned nudity, contained and trapped. The plain and dowdy white and yellow striped shirt-dress I wear is in stark contrast with the open toed, sling back, stacked-heel shoes with a labia-like frill, and the quasi-pornographic poses. I am doing a performance with the camera, not for it. I am responding to its confines, how it creates the space I am trying to fit into.

My step-grandfather speaks of his family’s escape from Turkey during the Armenian Genocide. It is a riveting account of atrocities committed against Armenian women. However, as spectators, we find our attention drifting from the serious story to the way Herant appears to think, expressively, before speaking. The afternoon light that colors the room, the woman who hovers behind the speaker, putting on her earrings, knick-knacks that clutter the space, persistently push forward into our consciousness. The past and present run parallel to each other, warping time and place. I deliberately include the domestic hubbub, the radio’s hum, and the children whining for dinner,
for these create space for us from where we can choose to attend to the tale, or not.

I traveled to Paris to find the home my father lived in during World War II, and from where he and my grandparents fled the Nazis and French Nazi collaborators. The shots are static: an exterior of the building with cars and people passing by; interior from the serene courtyard focusing on the same door; low angle shots of the building windows; and the lush garden of the concierge who helped hide my family. The subtitles tell the story of their persecution, but the focus of the video is on the building and the ghostly nature of a heavy history surrounding us as we go about our days, oblivious. Reading the text becomes a dramatic act while the images are hypnotic, verging on boring in their duration.
My videos involve endurance on both sides of the camera. Relying on long takes with no camera motion or angle modifications and with few edits—the works reveal the relative lack of activity on my part as videographer and call on viewers to wait for something to happen or change.

A litany of “Sorries.” What does it mean for a woman to advance and recede? To prostrate herself, grovel and slide away? To say “sorry” over and over? Is showing sympathy the same as accepting blame? What does it mean to have “Sorry I tried to kill myself in your house” next to “Sorry I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am”? Why do we become uncomfortable and embarrassed when forced to listen to this long and arduous list?

Videography, performance, and installation are merged in a timeline of still movements, creating an arrangement that allows the observer to dictate the figure's actions – the task she performs is contingent upon which segment they choose to view.
Continuum is a 2" x 20' x1" piece inspired by Radical Home. It is composed of 25 images exported from the 20 minute video. Each image is printed on cotton rag paper using archival ink and mounted to beveled archival foam core and vintage redwood. Images are also exhibited as discrete 2" x10" x1" pieces.

Fourth Wall is a floor to ceiling vertical projection of a woman superimposed on a formstone covered façade of a Baltimore row house. The projected shadows in the molded concrete cast a pattern upon her body as she stands deadpan, dances, paces, and squats, searching the floor. An occasional car or pedestrian passes by. Overlaid on these two shots is a view of a sidewalk scrolling underfoot and the occasional twirl of little circling feet in shoes and pink socks. Sounds of walking are interrupted by the age-old question, “Mama?” until the repetition becomes an ambient drone. The image is mundane and cyclical, like life within the container of motherhood. Recorded questions directly address the viewer: What do you eat when I’m not there? Are you afraid to shower? What do you wear when you sleep? I don’t want to get old or die. Who can I tell that I don’t want to? Do your towels match? Are you reaching up her skirt? Is your mother dead? Want to come over for dinner? Some questions are poignant, some are jarring, most are dull, and all are incongruous.

A swarm of ladies crawl, sneak, squat, and drag themselves along a pillow's desert landscape. Traversing the tricky terrain of the hairbrush, bow, and plug, each is a specter, a mouse, trapped or self-possessed, pacing her prison or marking her territory.
Radical Home is a 3240x720 video projected across three perpendicular 8 x 16 foot walls, in which the peripheral moves to the forefront.
The piece examines the concepts of objectification and power through the metaphor of the container as a social construct. The container is both a form of oppression and a set of borders we create for ourselves. Like a good parent, such an enclosure functions as a tether that allows one to wander but not stray.
When video is used to create a space in a four-walled installation, instead of eliding the specifics of location, the video becomes the location, the container that holds the viewer. Thus the video is endowed with both informational aura, and what I would call “place aura.” Video becomes an architectural intervention.