Halos On

One day, I bought a small lot of old Super 8 home movies for 15 bucks off eBay. Projected on my wall, I was struck by how many of the reels consisted of a random family's summer vacation footage. It felt slightly perverse to bear witness to the depth of a stranger's memories, and as I began wondering why they ended up for sale online, I felt a creeping obligation to destroy these images. Drown is what resulted from that endeavor.

Footage amassed from a randomly chosen assortment of Chinese movie DVDs sold at a curbside stand on Grand Street near my old apartment was used to construct a three part reflection on the stages leading up to, and immediately following the end of, a romantic relationship: longing, loss, and acceptance respectively.

Edited entirely using on-board VCR controls (fast-forward, rewind, pause, play), this video uses material culled from a trance music video and a car factory documentary, set to a remix of a remix of Toto's Africa. The cyclical, inhuman machinery of a factory, repetitive and heavily structured commercialized music, and the cyclical degradation and inevitable destruction of image and meaning under capitalism. An experiment in low quality.

A distant love better off forgotten, abstracted through images spread across four formats (miniDV, Super 8, 16mm, iPhone) shot over a three year period.

Super 8mm portrait of the Flaybrick Hill Cemetery in Birkenhead, England, where some of my ancestors were buried. Part tribute to those I could never know and part intimate survey of the grounds in which they rest.