Edit: Red Lipstick Project

So, in organizing applications for residencies etc. I've been going back through older projects and cleaning them up a bit.  One of those is The Red Lipstick Project  from over a year ago.  Despite the really rough execution, I think there's a lot of good stuff worth mining: I have a lot of footage of my friends--some of it usable, some not (lesson learned: in the future, I should probably not ask people to record themselves.  I should probably physically be there to direct them, using my own equipment), and all of the ideas and approaches I was trying out are still very much ideas and approaches that I am concerned with and that I consider worth investigating.  So, even if this is only a springboard exercise toward future endeavors in collaborative video projects, I think it's worthwhile.  That said, I've re-composed some of the footage into a new video, and I think it's a lot cleaner or possibly more straight-forward.  Blogger seems suddenly unable to access my YouTube videos, so please just click here to watch it for now. I was also able to upload it to my portfolio site, so feel free to stream it there if you'd prefer. 

I'm not sure if slowing them down was the right move, but I really wanted to focus on the gesture.

These have turned out to be my favorite still compositions:

I really like the mirror reflections and the focus on their facial expressions as they perform the gesture.  In going back through, I'm discovering that that is what I'm really interested in--getting a sense of what they're thinking/ how they're feeling. 

mənipyəlātəd melədēz (an Aurally Inclined Anagram Offshoot)

mənipyəlāt^əd melədēz is something I started back in March that involved breaking a song lyric down into the phonetic sounds of the words, and then making new, phonetic phrases.  I wrote out the phrases with the phonetic/ grammatical symbols and also recorded myself speaking the phonetic sounds out loud.  I was really into the resulting weird, mechanical vocals, which carry the anagram theme of reducing the phrase down to its most elemental level and re-constructing from that point.

So, I recorded this video, wherein I rearrange scrabble-looking tiles upon which I've written the phonetic symbols used in the lyric "Why is everything a chore?/ I'm too young to be defeated" from Surfer Blood's "Twin Peaks" into new, corresponding phrases, vocalizing the sounds as I go.

VIDEO: 

Kissing the Boundary Between You and Me

This is a very exciting update because this is the first video I've made using my new camera in the attic space!

So, the idea for this video started with an impulse to try to do something with my pseudo-poems.  I found an old window pane and hung it from one of the rafters in the attic, intending to sit behind it and write specific phrases on the glass in red lipstick while the camera recorded the action, and then also record myself speaking the phrases, separately.  I tried that, but it wasn't quite right.

I left the window pane hanging up there, still really wanting to use it, but feeling like maybe writing on it wasn't the way.  The window got me thinking about boundaries--the boundary between me and the camera, myself and the imagined viewer/ audience.  I thought how cool it would be to kiss the transparent surface of the mirror and have the camera record the accumulation of the marks left behind, especially if I was going to continue in the poem-y direction.  I've been reading Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson, and it's full of really excellent passages about the evolution of love poems and the dynamics of desire as lack.  Her words are far more deliberate than mine are at the moment, so I selected passages that I felt resonated best with the kissing gesture, and used the sound of my voice speaking Carson's words as a kind of narration. 

Flashback to January/2012: Melt/ Crystalize

During the only significant snowfall of this past winter, I made a snowball with a red/pink center, then used a heat gun to slowly melt it.

I recorded the process.  Sadly, the camera's battery ran out and the sun went down before I could completely melt the snowball, but I used the footage I got to make a video.  I sped up the footage to four times its original rate and reversed it so that it ends up as a fully formed snowball again.  Here's a low-res version of that video:

Here are some process stills I pulled from the video recording (note how much clearer they are...stupid video file size limits...): 

And here are some images I took during the act itself: 

It was a pretty spontaneous thing--when I did it, I was thinking about using heat to carve out an architectural interior space in the snow over time, without ever touching the snow.  The color was a playful element--I thought it would be more exciting if there was a reveal involved in the process.  It also made it sort of bodily, like the snow was bleeding, or growing orifices.  When I showed it to my class, the professor suggested that there was some sexual tension between the heat gun and the responsive snow.  I honestly hadn't been thinking consciously about that dynamic when I made this, but I can definitely see how he got there.  This is an important piece for me to look back on because it was my first concrete experiment with video as a medium, and because it involved me performing an action.

Recent Work: There With You

After my grandmother died, I gained access to a collection of love letters that she'd kept hidden in a shoebox in her underwear drawer her entire adult life.  My grandfather was shocked to discover them, but was able to identify the writer as Alex, the American soldier to whom she'd lost her virginity.  The dates of the letters indicated that she'd maintained the correspondence even after she'd already married my grandfather!  Looking at old pictures of her from the same time period, I realized that she very closely resembled the archetypal female figure from the dating manual images I used for the Marked photo series.  But these letters indicated a thrillingly complicated level of scandalous behavior into the mix.  I realized how little I really knew about this woman I'd called Momo since I was a baby, how much of her life she'd buried in order to become the woman I'd known.  I was impressed and charmed by the energy she'd seemed to possess when she was 19, but I also felt how difficult her life must have been at that time (in post-war Germany, with very few options), and an overbearing sense of tragedy, knowing how her life ultimately turned out.

I decided to make a pair of videos in an attempt to honor this secret aspect of her life.  It seemed to lend a more personal context for this whole investigation of performed femininity/ gender expectations that I've been circling in my work.  I edited Alex's original letters together into a message that conveyed the most significant-seeming details, as well as the overall cadence and tone.  Using Alex's words as a prompt, I invented a response letter from her, which had to be informed by my knowledge of her life during the early years of her marriage (I could think of no other way to access her experience).  I recorded myself reading each "letter", as well as the sound of me writing out the words by hand, and paired the audio with corresponding pictures of each of them.  Editing/recreating the text enabled me to emphasize/ infuse the aspects that most clearly speak to the choices she made from the options she was given.  Reading the words in my own voice allowed me to embody and empathize with each of them.  It was a very intimate thing, but also became distanced in a way through the dramatizing/ performing of it--they became characters playing roles in a particular situation.  It wasn't as though I really knew either of them as people, so their words and pictures still felt archetypal, even with the familial connection.

As a piece, I envision the videos being installed in a dark space, with Alex's video playing first on one wall, then Momo's response video playing on the opposite wall after his has ended, set up in such a way that the viewer has to stand between them.  Something like this:

There is also an element of exploring the intersection of past and present-- how our present knowledge and understanding of events can manipulate the space of the past; how events of the past can inform the present and speak to us about contemporary experiences.

Anyway, here are the videos:

Recent Work: Putting My Face On

This is another incarnation of the red lipstick investigation.  I set up a camera on a tripod in front of me and slowly filled my face with lipstick, using the camera as a mirror.  I was thinking about concepts like "beauty" and "femininity" and "sexuality" and the ways in which those ideas are constructed and performed.  It was also a gestural action that had a lot to do with drawing and painting practices.  I think of it as a really ambivalent self-portrait, because actually, I'm trying to discover who my "self" even is, and what it means to embody a particular "self" in the first place.  What defines me?  What if I use those things that are supposed to define me in a different way?  I'd like to open things up and explore the possibilities within limitations/ impositions--I want to examine the things that make me most uncomfortable to discover why, and if there's a way to change them.

Here's the video.  The high-quality version was too large to upload, so this is a lower-res version, and is therefore not as dazzling as it could be: 

I showed this video, projected onto a wall, for my final post-bacc critique (I was still calling it Face Fill then).  It was recently accepted into a massive group show, Color, at BWAC (Brooklyn Waterfront Artists' Coalition), juried by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, former curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum.  The opening is on the 28th, and the show is up through August 19th.  Go see it!  It's installed in a 9.5x12.5" screen, and is somewhat more dazzling than what you see above as a result.  Incidentally, I'm interested to see how a more intimate scale will lend itself to the viewing, compared to the wall projection, which had an imposing effect.  

Here are some progressive stills I put together for the application:

mouth

eyes

full face

And some shots of my face after recording: 

mirror reflection

 

mirror reflection

straight on

I attended the senior thesis show with my face like this as an experiment, before most people knew about the video.  It was fun to see people's reactions.  I had a few friends kiss my face, hoping that their lips would leave negative space marks on my face.  It didn't have that effect, but it did lend them some lipstick for their mouths/ chins/ noses.

 evidence

Recent Work: Red Lipstick Project

I've recently embarked on an investigation of red lipstick. It began when I decided to start wearing red lipstick every day to see how it would affect my daily mood/experiences, and snowballed into a video project, which I'm still in the middle of compiling. I started out with the idea of recording myself performing everyday actions while wearing the lipstick, in order to document the aesthetic transition that occurs once red lipstick has been applied (if/how connotations shift, if/how behavior is adjusted, etc.), and then decided that it would be richer to ask many people to experience this with me--I asked people I know to record themselves 1. applying red lipstick in a mirror, and 2. performing some mundane activity involving their mouth, and then to send me the footage. I've received 10 contributions so far, and am still open to accepting more. I've been keeping track of my personal thoughts/feelings about the experience in a document I'm calling Red Lipstick Reflections, and a few of the current participants have contributed their thoughts as well. It has been and continues to be a really fascinating experiment.

Here's a draft of the video (hope this works...):

And some stills:

Chris Sucking Lollipop
Me Drinking Beer
Rick Shaving
Danielle Peeing