The Desert Loops, 2005
4-channel video/audio installation,
color video w/ Dolby 5.1 Surround
audio on DVD, projectors, LCD screen
Running time: (4) Continuous loops

The Desert Loops re-visions footage from classic desert war films, focusing on the desert landscapes which form the backdrops for war and empire past and present.

Utilizing twenty-eight seconds of media, seamlessly looped on three projections and one LCD flat-panel monitor, the work borrows from several classic films where the desert landscape doubles as military theater for conflicts including World Wars 1 and 2. The films are sampled and modified (in some cases frame-by-frame) to rebuild the cracked, windswept landscapes resulting in the hypnotic and elegiac Desert Loops. The narrative context, romance and mythology of the original films are discarded in favor of both literal and allegorical presentation--and a clear allusion to the current conflicts in the Middle East.

Presented as a series of video loops picturing a stark, ominous and desolate landscape, The Desert Loops create a space for contemplation of conflict and history, while deconstructing Cinematic conventions and modes of representation.

The Desert Loops, 2005
Composite installation view

The Desert Loops, 2005
Video documentation and clips

Cosmic Microwave Background with New Humans, or
Interstellar Communication Breakdown, 2005
In collaboration with New Humans
multi-channel video/audio installation with live performance,
LCD projector, monitors, reflective mylar

Cosmic Microwave Background...was produced in collaboration with Brooklyn-based sound/installation artists New Humans for performances at Apexart and PS1 Contemporary Art Center (NYC).

The installation and performance creates an immersive environment sculpted from white noise and manipulated television static. Using a variety of electronically manipulated instruments, New Humans create a continuously undulating wall of sound inspired by radio static and television noise--familiar sounds that result from the emanation of microwave radiation permeating the Cosmos. Videos simultaneously play on stacked monitors and projections, all reflected in a silver mylar covered floor and walls. Television static is manipulated in very subtle, kaleidoscopic forms, and complex static-filled mattes created from classic Hollywood science-fiction films hover on the threshold of perceptibility. Just as sonic patterns slowly emerge from the dense soundscape, what first appears as common television static, reveals itself to be more upon careful observation.

COCKED, 2003
(from the ReVisionist Cinema series)
Color video w/audio on DVD for projection
or multi-channel monitor installation
Running time: 10:00

Produced during the peak of international debate regarding the United States’ initiative to invade Iraq, COCKED is an anti-war statement in the guise of a minimalist Western, borrowing dozens of short segments from several Cinema classics of the genre.

COCKED expands and sustains what is usually a brief, tense, cinematic moment--the showdown--and implodes the quintessential American mythology of the Western by denying the redemption of its protagonists through acts of violence. As this extended psychodrama plays out, the classic desert panorama characteristic of the Western’s cinematic space is collapsed into a metaphoric psychological space, where every gesture, glance and posture, communicate a mixture of aggression and fear, and nothing is resolved

Cocked, 2003
Video excerpt

Installation view from ReVisionist Cinema / Triple Feature, 2004

The Last Garden (in Memory of Freeman Lowell), 2007
Potted plants, fogger, live video feed, DVD, video mixer, rear-screen video projection, LCD monitor

Installation view of window-projection at ICA, Philadelphia. Produced in conjunction with LURE Project's Sweet Green Hangout for the exhibition Locally Localized Gravity

Based on Douglas Trumbull's 1972 eco-sci-fi classic, "Silent Running", The Last Garden extends the original film's narrative in which the last surviving forest of Earth, preserved aboard Spaceship Valley Forge, is left in the hands of a single robot programmed to care for it.

In The Last Garden (in Memory of Freeman Lowell), animated footage of this robot is mixed in real-time with a live-video-feed of a small garden located nearby in the gallery, creating a scene where the robot appears to be tending the garden. Whether the garden will survive or not will become clear over the course of the exhibition. As the work is projected on the ICA's windows each evening over the duration of the exhibition, LURE's greenhouse (Sweet Green Hangout) and the ICA itself will be transformed into Spaceship Valley Forge, posing questions about the fragility of our environment, and the delicate relationship between Man and Nature.

The Last Garden (in Memory of Freeman Lowell), 2007
Installation documentation

The Last Garden (in Memory of Freeman Lowell), 2007
Video stills (with live feed)