VIDEO
Here is a collection of some of the closer-to-my-heart videos that I’ve made in the last few decades. Hope you enjoy browsing!
THE ENTERTAINER AT REST
The Entertainer at Rest
This is a series of video profiles of full-time, freelance performing artists and multi-hypenates, at home, exploring the influence of their anarchistic career structures on their lives off-stage. each about 10 minutes, 2014
Featuring: (l to r) Matt Champagne, Aubrey Richmond, Kelly Perine, Jane Edith Wilson, and Scot Nery.
RWANDA
Birancyanga ("Confusing")
Edited for "A Kigali Conversation", a public forum held at the Goethe Institut in the capital, discussing the urban planning policies in Kigali. Featuring a song by Rwandan rap artist Ama G the Black, using footage I shot during the summer of 2013. 3 1/2 min, 2015.
Poems from Future Architects
During a trip to Rwanda in the summer of 2013, I was fortunate to meet some of the first cohorts of students graduating from the country's first architecture program. Here are five near-graduates reciting poems that try to explain "Where I'm From". Shot in and around their homes in Kigali. 9 min, 2014.
STOIC MEDITATIONS OF WOMACK
The Stoic Meditations of Womack
These musings of a cat wrestling with how to live fully through acceptance of one's mortality were originally presented as a twelve episode web series in 2013. They closely follow the earlier work of Marcus Aurelius and the twelve chapters of his Meditations.
Highlights include Womack's props to his mentors and inspirations in Episode 1, his grappling with the death of Lou Reed in Episode 8, and the final four episodes where we are left with nothing but his wisdom, and his encouragement that even that is enough.
MOCA’S ENGAGEMENT PARTY AND OTHER DOCUMENTATION
Engagement Party (documentation)
From 2008 to 2012, Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art was home to Engagement Party, a monthly evening of social-practice art featuring various artist collectives in rotation every three months, with the goal of finding new and unexpected ways for people to explore and interact with the museum. As sustained and varied a catalog of art-as-social-practice as has been hosted anywhere, it resulted in–among many other things–my production of 28 videos documenting almost every performance in the series. Artists included: Finishing School, knifeandfork, Ojo, Slanguage, My Barbarian, Lucky Dragons, Ryan Heffington & the Eastsiders, The League of Imaginary Scientists, The Los Angeles Urban Rangers, Liz Glynn, and Camlab.
Find out more about MOCA's Engagement Party by going here.
Below are 12 of the original 5 to 10 minute pieces documenting the experience of each evening.
We Will Show You Fear in a Handful of Dust
The artist collective Finishing School, joined by Nadia Afghani and Matt Fisher, work to install a 1:1 replica of a Predator Drone to be covered in mud by members of the community using traditional mixing and application techniques. 7 mins, 2014.
Knitting Nation 12: H20
Artist Liz Collins leads students and faculty of Occidental College in a one-day attempt to transform the landscape with a cascade of knitting. 6 mins, 2013.
Other documentation projects have included a Liz Lerman dance piece, the plays of William Levitt, performances by the Pasadena Chorale (including Beethoven’s 9th with full orchestra), projects of Bestor Artchitecture, Scripps Presents, and numerous exhibitions at Hauser + Wirth Los Angeles.
INSTALLATIONS
Back East
Above is a three minute sequence compiled from a 90 minute hyperlapse traveling from my parents' grave in Huntington Beach, California to each of their parents' graves in Maritime Canada, revisiting places along they way they had visited during their separate migrations to California in the 1960's. 2011.
Coin
One of several installation videos done in collaboration with Clare Whistler, as part of her Gift series of art events, each organized around a traditional gift given to a newborn. Coin took place in an old coast guard cottage on the south coast of England in East Sussex in 2014.
My first collaboration with Clare was on an earlier Gift event, Coal, in 2007, in a barn near the site of the Battle of Hastings.
CLASSICS
The Making of Forces of Nature
After years of attempting to get quality tornado footage for the IMAX film Forces of Nature, future stormchasing reality-show hero Sean Casey finally has his day, and learns valuable lessons that will be taken to heart for his next film. Shot for National Geographic TV, 5 min. excerpt edited by Alex MacInnis, 2002.
It Walks by Night
For LACMA's installation of Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass, a 340 ton boulder was slowly transported during 11 nights from a quarry in Riverside along a route zig-zagging over a hundred miles through suburban Los Angeles, in a feat of engineering and planning estimated to have cost $10 million. Music performed by Teodoro Anzelloti. 5 min, 2012.
Hippos on a Hybrid
Celebrating the high-concept release of Snakes on a Plane, the Alamo Drafthouse sponsored the Blanks on a Blank contest, where entrants were assigned via random computer algorithm an animal/being and a vehicle to use as subjects in a video, with various other contractual constraints also inspired by the film. 5 mins, 2006.
Mary Over Mojave
On the 13th of every month, as many as 4,000 pilgrims would venture to an isolated spot in the Mojave Desert to experience apparitions of the Virgin Mary by taking Polaroid photos of the sun. 26 mins, 1999.
Down by Law (2006)
A reprisal of the opening credits of Jim Jarmusch's classic film Down by Law using footage shot in New Orleans and Mississippi nine months after Hurricane Katrina. 5 mins, 2006.