Solstice Arches

LED-lit balloon arches
Lighting of the Quads, Dec 3, 2014
Johns Hopkins University

Photos by Daniel Anderson

Students built simple LED circuits and added their LED-lit balloon to construct 3 12-ft high balloon arches within the span of one hour, in celebration of Johns Hopkins University's Lighting of the Quads.

LOOPOFF:  Animation Loops

Curated by Kelley Bell
Transmodern Festival, Sep 21-27, 2014
Maryland Art Place, Current Space, and IMP Gallery

You Are What You Eat 

You Are What You Eat, is an animation of rotoscoped kitchen disaster scenes, the sources of which are Hollywood films, projected in a continuous frieze on three walls.

 The hearth is the heart of the home. If that's true, then it follows that the kitchen would be a site fraught with tension.  It can be a place of warmth and comfort, but also present are all of the pressures of the home—from family conflict to cultural contradictions to anxieties.  These tensions haunt the kitchen.  The kitchen, as a site in movies, represents the social, psychological, and interpersonal tension of the time.

Through the drawing process, I stripped away much of the set, keeping the characters, the objects they directly interact with, and one or two appliances and/or windows.  I use rough, almost abstract outlines. This approach has an equalizing effect.  The characters are androgynous and look alike, and the kitchens are generic.  This is no-kitchen and every-kitchen.

Butch

Butch, is a triptych of three looping videos, each featuring a still portrait of a male professional athlete who is crying animated tears.  His image is superimposed on a live-action video of amateurs playing his sport.

Tennis is a notoriously weepy sport.  But still, this moment brought up a lot of questions for me.  I cry more about sports than anything else. Why?  Vicarious living?  Idealized moments of human triumph and failure?  The imperfect working of mind and body?  Winning big and losing hard?  And then, larger questions emerge:  When is it culturally acceptable for a man to cry in public?  If crying is a show of weakness (therefore anti-macho), then we have an interesting contradiction here: One of the only times we see men publicly crying is in professional sports, perhaps the most male-dominated profession in what still is arguably a very male-dominated society.

On the individual level, a psychological explanation seems clear:  a release of emotion right after an exhausting physical struggle in an emotionally heightened event, one moment in time for which the athlete has spent years, maybe decades preparing.  On a social level, it is such a common occurrence that it suggests that contradictions thrive in the social construction of gender.

Vs.Vs.Vs. 

Two VCRs locked in an infinite push and pull. 

Andy Warhol Shot Me

Site-specific single Channel 3-D animated video projection.  This video was design for and installed in the Phoenix Shot Tower for Current Gallery's Hope Against Hope exhibition.