Media Works

Some artworks are designed to make a complicated world more intelligible. Others are designed to make it more strange.   (“It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.” – Baudrillard.)

There is no account of anything that cannot be replaced by a different account.

Pataphysical pedagogy for primates; a caustic comedy. An exercise in unknowing. (What we cannot know about monkeys is more meaningful than what we know.) A work in support of uncertainty. (The inability to acknowledge and work with non-knowledge is what drives some into the arms of religion and conspiracy theories.) An attempt to improve the quality of our misunderstandings. (Non-meaning is logically prior to meaning.) “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” (Wittgenstein)

A haunted story, part dreamscape, part travel guide.

Familiar objects absorb wayward thoughts and are transformed, reshaped, metastasized. 

A pandemic work.

In the radiant light of the late afternoon, priorities are reassessed.  

“What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, it’s relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God, in terms of what he is not.”    – S. Beckett

Anthropology exists in a cloud of knowledge and non-knowledge.

Animals, Nature, Contracts – a glossary of forgotten words, ideas, and certainties.

We wake up in the morning and we wonder
Why everything’s the same as it was
We can’t understand, no, we can’t understand
How life goes on the way it does.

Installation: Art & Media Lab, Queen’s University
Collaboration with Matt Rogalsky

Video/audio installation, whose primary features are the visualization of all the words with exclamation marks in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), and a player piano with an audio counterpart synchronized with the visual flow of words.

Mama Minde provides a glimpse into the foundational work of Elizabeth Minde, the founder and co-director of KWIECO (Kilimanjaro Women Information Exchange and Consultancy Organization) located in Moshi, Tanzania. Elizabeth Minde founds her legal and activist work on a crucial distinction between Tanzanian statutory law and local customary law. Finding statutory law better able to protect women’s rights, she has worked tirelessly for decades to move women from a customary to a statutory legal framework, in order to secure property and personal rights for women who are often isolated and vulnerable that would otherwise be denied.

A training exercise in nihilism. The basic actions of picking up and putting down are stripped of meaning. They are detached from the material world. They resemble nothing other than themselves. They have no identity, no goal; they communicate nothing. They have nothing to say. Because they have no value, their value is infinite. Because they cannot speak, they say everything.

When we look at the world, it becomes an image. That image detaches itself from the thing that it is an image of, just like a sound detaches itself from the thing that makes it. The image can, under certain circumstances, becomes the image-itself, the way that language became language-itself for Alice. The image-itself of the world becomes wider than the world itself is.

A training exercise in nihilism. The basic actions of picking up and putting down are stripped of meaning. They are detached from the material world. They resemble nothing other than themselves. They have no identity, no goal; they communicate nothing. They have nothing to say. Because they have no value, their value is infinite. Because they cannot speak, they say everything.

Only Believe Things That Are Easy to Understand is a series of collisions between antagonistic terms: knowledge, belief, justified emotions, good fortune, books, and lucky numbers.

Perceptive students contemplate philosophical classics while pondering their position within the education apparatus.

The Child’s Concept of Chance reconfigures words, concepts and images from numerous traditional fairy tales and filmic sources into one anarchic, mythic, meta-fairy tale completely deficient in narrative purpose and moral instruction.

An homage to the suspicious intuitions of Sigmund Freud, as he speculates on the science of feelings, and the denial of the ‘oceanic.’

A series of unworkable speculations — guesswork, really — on why people believe what they believe, with the aim of promoting improved children, better gorillas, and honest legislation.

A bicycle is a vehicle consisting of a light frame mounted on two wire-spoked wheels, a seat, and handlebars. If we can’t feel confident in how we come to understand bicycles, then we can’t be confident about anything.

How To Lose Consciousnes is a non-redemptive constellation of religious belief, torture, and meaningless form. Confined in a basement by religious zealots, a woman must produce 8 unassociated documentaries to secure her freedom.

Three recognizable characters are trapped on a stage of their own making; that’s what you get when images and words ignore their responsibilities.

A covert affiliation has long existed between thought, film, and fish. jesuscalling… is a work of archeology, searching for the archaic site where those who called were separated from those who failed to answer.

Installation: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston; 2004
1 video projection; 2 video works on monitors.

If language is god, then god is language.
If language isn’t god, then god is language.
If god is language, the language isn’t god.
If god isn’t language, then language isn’t god.

Against a palindromic background, tourist-words line-up between the tall and the small, float between the bombers and the bombed, and celebrate the resourcefulness of raccoons.