Portal (2)

Using conventions common to a witches' magic circle, Portal (2) is a gateway to the paternal spirits of my family in Utah. Strategically aligned with the four cardinal directions, this ritualistic pyramid harnesses both masculine and feminine power, concentrating their energy at the zenith where the four corner meet.

The evoking spiral in Portal (2) was created using photographs of men on my paternal family from the 1860s through today, while the lyrics were sourced from Echo Canyon, an American Civil War-era song that romanticized the back-breaking work that many young Mormon boys endured while working on the transcontinental railroad.

While Portal (2) is fundamentally a vehicle for ancestral worship, it posits the conflicting nature of exalting familial men who were imperfect at best and down right repugnant at worst. Portal (2) is an opportunity to learn from the mistakes and blunders of my ancestors, while cumulatively building on their core strengths and values.

Funeral Procession / Portal (1)

Funeral Procession / Portal (1) merges the technology of today with the mysticism and rituals of antiquity. Sampling a modern recreation of an ancient Greek funeral song, I have stretched the recording over 100 times so that the audible moments are abstracted to haunting drones and chimes. The recording is then imputed into a program that I have written, rendering visualizations from those sound frequencies.

Funeral Procession was featured in Empedocles' Ghost, a collaboration with Noysky Projects and The Syndicate of Creatures at Warehouse9, an early 20th century slaughterhouse in Copenhagen's Meatpacking District. The rustic gallery was formerly a holding pen where cattle were taken to be watered and cleaned after they were auctioned off to the highest bidder. The cattle were later shuttled to their final destination, where they were slaughtered in a nearby building. The video installation was inspired by this deeply charged place, referring to the fleeting moment when the spirit leaves the body as it travels between the transitory plane between the living and the dead.

Black Mirror

A black mirror is a device that practitioners of witchcraft use for scrying — an act of divination to see the past, present, and future. The process involves intently gazing into a reflected surface, literally a black mirror, to allow patterns of symbolic resonance to appear.

Black Mirror explores our relationship with technology, the mind, and spirituality by allowing the them to coalesce on a mirrored surface with live digital video, which provide outlets for reflecting on the idea of “self”.

As viewer walks into the mirrored area, they make superficial observations from the moment to see themselves as they presently are. As the mind wanderers, the viewer allows moments from past to come to percolate and see themselves as they were. Meanwhile, the computer creates an abstracted image from the live video, opening the possibilities of what could be.