Who are your biggest ar/s/c influences?
I think my biggest influences go back to early video art, especially its peak in the 80s.
Tony Oursler is one of my big ones. I’m very drawn to the way his work treats the body and voice as distorted materials that have already been worked on by the image. It
made me look at the screen itself as a kind of threshold rather than just a surface for
showing something, and it’s probably a big part of why I often find myself returning to
analog aesthetics and analog horror as a contemporary form that borrows from the
same haunted relationship to the screen, even as the screens themselves have changed.
The body horror genre is another reference point for me, where the body gets to
function as a site of transformation rather than a stable image. It’s a genre that also
peaked in the same era, with David Cronenberg its most obvious pioneer, but I’ve also
found myself really drawn to a few more recent films that have refreshed the same
territory. I like how they have grounded the unease and underlying conditions to a very
specific, embodied experience of identity.
What does your work aim to say?
The quesDon I keep coming back to is less about what to say, but how. What visual
languages exist that don’t already assume how an image, a voice or a body should
behave. A lot of the artists and filmmakers I return to don’t treat these as something
fixed or neutral, since they’re all searching for new languages that can hold contradiction
and instability. That’s ultimately what I’m aBer too. Not a new style or message so much
as a way of representing things that conventional image-making oBen doesn’t quite have
the room for: the in-between, the haunted, the unresolved. I want to see what happens
when text, voice and image stop supporting each other and start pulling apart instead.
When they shape and contradict another rather than simply illustrating the same thing.
What’s your background? / How has your education helped you in your career?
I originally studied film, specifically ending. For me that area has always felt like the
space where the most can actually happen. The point where sound, image and text
come together and start acting on each other rather than just being placed side by side. I
prefer discovering what a piece becomes once its elements are put in the same room
than direct a single vision from the start.
I quickly found the more traditional framework of film to be too limited, and ending
alone wasn’t enough either. I was always working with someone else’s footage. That
pushed me towards fine arts, where I had more room to break away from the single
screen and start experimenting with video in a more installation-based context. Editing
software became less of a finishing tool and more the actual site of making.
Funny enough, I ended my master’s by returning to a single screen film. But by then my
framework around what a film could be had expanded enough that the format itself felt
completely different to work in.