Title: Swallow
Medium: Video Art
Description: Swallow is the fourth piece of a seven-part collaborative film series that mirrors the seven-step alchemical transformation of matter into gold. The piece questions the commodification and transformation of feminism. Is calling someone a feminist just a label? Are we being brainwashed by “femi-Nazis?” Like in The Matrix, the protagonist is offered a pill: would you rather purge and see through the illusions that we are being fed, or do we prefer to relent to consumerism? These questions pave the way for self actualization, truth seeking, and awakening to the realities of misogynist oppression.
Title: Mirror
Medium: Video Art
Description: This extract of Mirror creates a conversation between Timothy Leary, Jean Baudrillard, and John Berger’s writings about what it means to be a viewer and consumer of media in the modern-day digital world. Alternating between images of myself and images from popular media, the viewer is asked the question: “why do I have this need to consume?”
Title: You Must Die
Medium: Animated Digital Photography
Description: This piece reimagines a shrine to the Holy Spirit. The subject, a dying dog whose bones are visible, is in the shape of a triangle, alluding to the Holy Trinity and also communicating balance, as the triangle is considered the most geometrically stable configuration on a surface. The ethereal image of the dog close to death and the encapsulation of the spirals alludes to the circular and repetitive nature of divinity. His body floats downwards over and over again, returning to Earth and source. When he reappears, he is not reborn, and thus this shrine excludes the consideration of birth– Death is portrayed as our only certainty.
Exhibition: The audience walks through a narrow hallway made of ten vertical screens facing each other in pairs. On each screen, You Must Die plays on a loop, out of sync with the others. The audio plays overhead. The hallway is approximately twenty feet long.
Title: My Name Is
Medium: Video Art
Description: My Name Is is a video art piece about my sense of fragmented multicultural identity. The film transitions from French to Polish to English, the three languages most central to my identities. Each section exists as a tribute to a filmmaker that I admire in that language, in order: Chris Marker, Krszysztof Kieslowski, and Jonathan Caouette.
Title: Untitled Reality
Medium: Video Art
Description: This extract of Untitled Reality questions whether constructing digital realities and simulations is a form of insanity. Many “schizophrenics” are diagnosed because they interact in realities different from the “real world,” yet this same quality could be said of many storytellers, writers, and artists. Extracts of vintage footage from mental asylums are cut with fictionalized talking head interviews of two video artists who interrogate what it means to “go crazy,” and why we fear it.
Title: Alice Through The Looking Lens
Medium: Fiction Documentary
Description: This piece is a documentary fiction that tells the story of Alice, an elderly person who believed in political ideals similar to many modern left-leaning discourses. This video references Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer by filming the subject of the film reacting to watching the film itself. The extract shows Alice reacting to the longer film at large and discussing with younger people about its implications on cross-generational political collaboration. Questions that the piece asks are, “can older people collaborate with young people in building a better future?” and, “what can we learn from each other?”