Artist Statement
I tell deeply personal stories that I hope will connect to an audience who can find their experiences reflected and validated in my films.
I explore stories through experimental modes of filmmaking. For me, experimental film allows for a symbiotic relationship between story and the medium — as such, I look for the formal qualities of experimental filmmaking that can best signify the narrative meaning. In my work, I have used many different filmmaking techniques, including rotoscoping, projection, optical printing, object animation, assemblage, film scratching, ray-o-gramming, the re-appropriation of ephemeral films, and growing moss on film leader, to name a few.
Each of these methods has allowed for a re-imaging and re-imagining of the original photographed thing. This moment of reimagining allows for a place to emphasize associations or juxtapositions within the image plane and challenges the notion of an image being a fixed thing. The various experimental techniques I use employ a certain element of hand-craftedness, and it is with purpose that I leave traces of the process that refer back to me as the maker/shaper/appropriator.
Most of my films are strongly visual, narratively open-ended and open to interpretation. In this way, I can suggest the personal and the universal and bring together documentary and formal impulses. I seek to connect my personal stories to universal instincts and archetypes. I often make connections to folktales and dreamlike states of being. This exploration is represented both in ideation and in the visual rendering of the films that I make.I am mindful that the stories we tell about ourselves inform the way we understand ourselves. The stories that I tell about myself emphasize class, gender and place.
Background
The story of my life and my path to where I am now is this: I grew up in an industrial town in Northwest Indiana, where I spent angsty teenage years dreaming of living as an artist without having any idea of what that means. I saw the film,Blue Velvet at the impressionable age of 15 and became fixated on becoming a filmmaker. I went to Indiana University, the large state university, where I studied Germanic Studies and Film Studies. I tried to eschew my filmmaking dreams in favor of something more “reasonable”, but I couldn’t shake it and so got an MFA in Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University.
After completing my degree, I moved to NYC, fulfilling a long-time dream. I worked for a short while as an assistant editor and editor at a postproduction company that cut television commercials, where I learned much about the economy of storytelling and the craft of editing. While in NYC, I taught night film classes at the New School and, inspired by my positive experience there, decided that mentoring young people and making more space in my life to work on my own films would be a better path for me. I’ve taught amazing and talented students at the University of Michigan and now at Pacific University in Oregon. I find my life in Oregon beautiful and gratifying. My more recent films are deeply rooted in place and are often love-poems to the Northwest.