Posts
Relationships Between Shots
This scene from Terence Davies' 1992 melodrama The Long Day Closes is interesting for its poetic, rather than strictly continuous, use of editing. The film, which consists of an impressionistic series of memories and dreams rather than narratively-organized scenes, frequently disobeys the rules of conventional editing to suggest the nonlinear flow of thought and emotion. This sequence opens up with a shot of the young protagonist Bud working on a bike with an older relative. The shot then cuts to an image of Bud's family cycling away on their bikes. Obviously some sort of jump has occurred--we've moved from inside to outside--but there's nothing to suggest what period of time has been encompassed in the jump. The two shots are associated by the symbol of the bike instead of any clear continuity. The subsequent two shots, which show Bud calling out to his family before cutting back to them cycling off, more clearly establishes a spatially consistent point-of-view throug...
Blog #2
On the street corner, a man is shouting some Biblical verses at top volume. When I pass by him I can actually feel the faint reverberations in my chest. He’s so loud that he almost drowns out the rattle of the cyclist scudding past in the street lane. There aren’t many cars on this block at this hour, but there are a lot of cyclists, most of them running food deliveries. The soft whir of their wheels forms a pleasant ambient backdrop to the more specific details of the evening soundscape (chatter at outdoor restaurants, snatches of conversation caught from pedestrians, the tap of my own shoes on the sidewalk). Much fainter, further away, sirens and car honks muddled by distance; or more immediately, the occasional sudden rumble of a subway from beneath the metal grates, accompanied by a hissing woosh of hot air. With the exception of the corner preacher, these are all more or less familiar noises to me. Less expected is the woman who runs out of the front doors of my dorm, clasping her...
Artist's Statement
My general aesthetic concern, both as an individual artist and as an admirer of the art of others, basically centers on the exploration of states of suffering. So much of our culture exists to shield us and separate us from a direct awareness of the suffering of others: even as we are overwhelmed by a nightly barrage of dystopian images on the evening news (whether it be the tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic, the chaotic impact of U.S. imperialism abroad, mass shootings, refugee crises, or the oncoming climate disaster), the overall effect is to numb us, to render us paralyzed and detached from both the outrage of these images and from our own involvement in and capacity to change them. My work would ideally aim to counterpoint such desensitization by bringing the viewer into a more immediate and unsettling contact with the reality of suffering (either physical or emotional), jolting them into a clearer understanding of their relationship to these scenes as a spectator and thus hopefu...