This is a short film I worked on from fall 2024 to spring 2025 in response to the time passed since my mothers passing in 2019. It is composed of old VHS, mini-DV films and current digital footage from 2025. Using software from my graduate schools digital lab utilizing adobe suite, iMovie, VCR’s and vintage Sony tape software to help convert the films from the 90’s and early 200’s. Thank you for watching. I hope to make many more films after this.
I spent many hours, organizing and digitizing old tapes into digital files of my family’s memories (or at least the memories I could get a hold of). I would like to think that this was for a good reason but I do not want to get stuck in the past. The past few years of my practice has been stuck in nostalgic moments. The reality of that is that being stuck in the past. I think it can be incredibly dangerous to be stuck in the past. Grieving like the way I have been—or not can be harmful to the progression of personal growth and also growing in my practice.
It took a visiting critic, Carrol Armstrong, to look at my work and tell me that it seems that I had been looking for a way forward instead of working with the nostalgia of my past. That studio visit and conversation was important to me because I believe it was the first time someone shared that they understood the significance of photography in my practice. She gave a perspective on what photography was doing in my work and how It impacted my paintings. This was my window of realization of how I was completely stuck in my practice and how to fix it.
The prior semester I had a few experiences with a professor that I swore was trying to get into my head. Told me that I had nothing but excuses for not being able to paint what she considered “enough paintings” and so much more horrible shit she projected on to me. That took me out for a while. I felt like it was someone trying to psychoanalyze me instead of figuring out what I was doing with my work. I had already been struggling on my own about what’s “good enough” and I found it laughable that she thought she was saying anything different than what I had been already be telling myself. I thought at first this was someone getting to know me but then realized no…this was the cog and its machine trying to straighten me out.
I wanted to share this to give context around my mental health at the time. I felt very outside myself. I wanted nothing more than clarity, that would allow me to just make the work but I came to that program to get feedback after all. So I didn’t think it was harmful to expect validation or my questions to be answered about what I was trying to do within my work.
Anyways, like many people like to mention “everything happens for a reason”. I really have grown to understand that, this is true, but it doesn’t justify the sometimes shitty things that happens within the process. You grow a callous for the things that develop you.
This video is one of the many ways I have tried and am continuously trying to understand my grieving. Grief does not only belong to me and I am trying to paint, film and illustrate the feelings that comes with the territory of it.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like, please leave a few thoughts of your own about the short film, grief itself, or whatever this post brings up for you down below in the comment section.