STOP MOTION
SOUND ON!!!!
RACQUET FISH. 1/23
A video I made from a vintage Sports Illustrated magazine about Racquetball to answer a prompt from Adidas "Impossible is Nothing". Because who says you can't play racquetball with a fish?
Note: Sound kicks in around 5 seconds.
MORE SOUP 2/23
A silly commentary on consumerist culture using vintage Campbell soup ads from old magazines and sounds of myself making soup.
MIDNIGHT SNACK. 9/22
I made this video when I was hungry at midnight. Made using vintage national geographic magazines, paper, and an apple.
Spliced a home video of my sister dancing with some leaves that I scanned after finding them at the park. Accompanied the release of my zine Meldrop&Mildew.
MIlDEW. 11/22
THOMAS. 9/22
This is a video portrait of Thomas, whom I had the pleasure of speaking with on a total of two occasions. Thomas works at Trader Joes but he used to work at a plant store. He listens to Tame Impala and Mac DeMarco, he reads Henry David Thoreau, and he’s pretty radical when it comes to politics. He’s in improv and is studying film and has quite the sense of humor. In the spirit of his passion for improv, much of his portrait was improvised and loosely inspired by how he takes on a multitude of humorous characters during an improv show.
TECHNOCRACY. 7/21
This video spurred out of a conversation with my dad--about how when he grew up, nobody had to constantly know where you were, who you were friends with, and what you were doing--because it simply wasn’t possible without technology. I feel that navigating adolescence in a time of technocracy confused the development of my identity, as my online self was a neverending performance of forced connections, incentivized fakeness, and constant self-consciousness. Memories became tainted by photo-worthy, smiling moments. This video’s audio sampled six songs from The Avalanches (3), The Garden, The Flying Stars of Brooklyn, and Teo.
SELF. 2/21
The first video in the collection reflects on the process of growing up as a queer person of color in my very cookie-cutter, predominantly white hometown. The video, broken into stages, first tackles innocence, as tennis balls, watermelon, and a badminton birdie drop from an airplane instead of the expected, bombs. As this initial innocence is broken, I mark adolescence with 50s and 60s suburban conformist culture imagery--a depiction of identity repression. Eventually, an escape from this repressive state occurs as psychedelic imagery starts uncovering. However, the ending suggests “finding one’s true self” is impossible, as something constantly tainted by invisible social pressures and marginalizing structures.
MEMORIES IN MOTION. 11/21
This short stop motion reflects socially-constructed time-enforced life stages that I feel expected to fulfill as I get older. These constructs often reflect white, heteronormative suburban norms, such as young love, settling down, and having this picture-perfect, picket-fence family. I’ve begun to realize that a lot of these stages are much more difficult to “accomplish” as a queer person--who spent most of my adolescence trying to repress and then understand my queerness instead of falling in love--but that going without some of these stages does not make life less meaningful.