In part the world taught me this. Like how so much of visual culture - i.e. images, films, adverts - subliminally communicate ideas about good and bad, the right type of people and life, and the bad kind: a brightly lit surburbia vs a dark and orange toned ghetto; lighting with a silky texture and the most plesant of sounds when a muscular able bodied white man comes into frame makes us know him as attractive; unthinking, uncaring bad lighting transform a black man into a monstrous hulking shadow; multi hued lighting that reflects off sheening dark skin triggering erotic and nonerotic hunger. For me, film and video can be spaces to resist these techniques, to construct new ways of being impacted by seeing and listening, to upend ways of connecting with the world: can a disharmonious staccato burst of images and sound feel tender and calming?
I’ve been concerned more and more with the cinematic, specifically how it overdetermines action, desire, imagination, and how it structures possibilities, and forecloses others.
I try to practice opacity in my work, in the Glissant sense and fragmentation is a strategy for this, as well as collaging. I am quite wary of making work that is easily understood by folk in privileged, oppressive social positions, or that is too open and naked, at risk of being denuded, co-opted, eliciting too much pleasure. I try to make work that requires sustained engagement across multiple moments and registers. My love of layering comes from thinking about historical sedimentation, Foucault’s epistemic grid or the Field sisters notion of ideology.