Video Works
2020-2021
New Video Coming Soon!
The land speaks through bodies. Like knowledge, like threading beads, it is pulled through– cosmic, corporeal, expansive, deceased. The land is multiple, expansive, ebullient, just as we are. It is all our bodies working, speaking through dance and cry. My body works in the land alongside more-than-human kin, plant relatives, and atomic-cosmic-quivering to perform ceremony: to remember, to heal, to mourn, and to grow. These land-based collaborations build collective memory and enact survivance as we celebrate comic bodies moving in time to the heartbeats of light particles and sound waves, trembling and world shaking. Recording technology (sound and lens-based media) entangles with us, tracking us as we track back, pushing one another as a necessary and reciprocal process of breaking, changing, playing, and healing together, apart, alongside. The momentary landing points which serve as my artwork are fragments, pieces for offering. They are bits of dust and dirt, star and song– I hope to call the land closer. My kin and I invite you to call yourself closer to the land, as well. We invite you to remember, to mourn, to heal, and we will do this work alongside. We will claim you as you claim us. Iksukapi. Thank you.
This Land Holds Within It A Fever (2021)
This Land Holds Within It A Fever queers euro-centric, western, colonial, heteropatriarchical, and anthropocentric notions of family structure, health, and bodily relations to land by engaging questions around what it means to live in the land as the land lives in you. Tracking and tracing personal experiences of land-based illness through expansive poetic lenses of dirt, bodies, performance, intergenerational and interspecies communication (languages of poetry, song, and more-than-human kin), This Land Holds Within It A Fever takes from as multivocal storytelling through experimental, immersive video art. Bodies of land, more-than-human kin, human, disease, weather, and water play together with their entangled, webbed, and intimate relationality. We invite moments where the boundaries between bodies breakdown, just as they do, have, and will at sites of exposure when bodies collide. This reciprocal, simultaneous, and constantly shifting positionality invites the rupture of binaries between risk and safety, pleasure and pain, illness and survivorship, while at the same time confronting palimpsestuous relations to land that are at once exploitative, colonial, and tender. Intimate emotional relations to land are performed, explored, expanded and questioned through layered soundscape and visualized through a tension of lens-based imagery which constructs, mediates, and often limits interaction between land and other actors. My dogs were collaborative filmers and performers in this work. Their bodies are battling the land-based life-long fungal infection, Valley Fever, for which this work takes its name.
Come Sit On My Lap, Sweetie (2021)
“Come Sit on my Lap, Sweetie” subverts uncomfortable familial encounters where relations coerce younger family members into nonconsensual contact with their bodies by engaging intergenerational trauma, complicating Indigenous stereotypes of Native women, and paralleling the U.S. government’s paternalistic approach to denying Indigenous sovereignty. Utilizing abrupt montage editing and unsettling scoundscape, the work literally scalps colonial relations to Indigenous communities involving bodily violence. This work is dedicated to the pandemic of murdered and missing Indigenous peoples.
Nourishment (2021)
“Nourishment” explores the intersection of domestic creative space, emotional labor, and caretaking under isolating and expropriating conditions of late capitalism, heteropatriarchy, ongoing colonial occupation of land, and pandemic quarantine. Borrowing from Martha Rosler, Sadie Benning, and Robin Wall Kimmerer I mix, match, satirize, and perform in reference to instructional cooking videos, personal narratives/ diary entries, and food preparation as ceremony. Glitch distorts narrative and performative information as a visualization of the mechanical technology emoting, exposing a breakdown in its function and the borders of its labor.
Marrow Mourning (2020)
“Marrow Mourning” is meant to disturb and inform its audience about the painful rending of bodily connections to land, community, ceremony, and each other that Indigenous womxn must constantly struggle against settler colonial oppression to maintain connection to themselves and their communities. Illustrated through interactions of a mother and daughter literally carving space for themselves within the land and found footage from the current Wet’su’eten land defender struggle, “Marrow Mourning” is a painful meditation on Indigneous resilience against continued colonial occupation of Native land.
The Virus (2020)
A meditation on the weaponization of disease and colonial medical malpractice. US governmental agencies posturing themselves to protect the health of their nation bring smallpox blankets, bring cellphones, bring bodybags, all offered as gifts. My grandmother tells me a story of almost drowning. My nation tells me a story and it is lying.
