Genres: experimental

  • What You Are Out Here For

    * No Normal Festival 2023 * Official Selection International Portrait Festival 2022 * Gallery Stratford Installation 2022/23 * Official Selection Recontres Internationales Traverse Festival 2022 * Official Selection Athens Animfest 2022 * Official Selection Forest City Film Festival 2021 * Carbon Art & Design Installation 2021 * Bark Park/Washing Machine Outdoor Installation NYC 2021 * Official Selection Van Der Plas Animation Festival & Installation 2021 Springboarding off original illustrations by the internationally renowned artist Jason McLean, What You Are Out Here For experiments with experimental film-making itself, putting McLean’s art for the first time into motion. The open-ended and coming-of-age…

  • Water Over Glass

    * Official Selection Antimatter Film Fetsival 2020 * Official Selection Vancouver International Film Festival 2019 (nominated Best of BC Film Award) In Water Over Glass, the tension of a mind adrift and in conflict with itself is captured and bookended visually by the vast mutability of sea and sky, where water and air surfaces suggest both static and the dissolution of the individual. A doppelganger, a crime scene and the tidal erasure of what might have taken place: discomfiting moments in a bright, almost psychedelic, arc. Assembled from 16mm, super 8, and digital video, stop-motion collage and digital compositing animation,…

  • Exercises for Being Close to You: A Story for the Arctic Refuge

    Exercises for Being Close to You is an experimental documentary that follows a group of hikers through Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The team is in search of the Porcupine Caribou herd in hopes of collecting stories that could help push back on oil exploration and drilling on the caribou’s birthing grounds. The narrator, admitting to a perverse desire to be close to everything, wants nothing more than to spoon a caribou. As the film culminates in anticipation of the “money shot”, the audience is pushed to evaluate its expectations of nature films. Meanwhile, the expedition team is left to…

  • Freak Folks

    Struggling with anxious thoughts, six individuals wander alone through the city in the late hours of the night. “Freak Folks” is an introspective and therapeutic experience that celebrates the human resilience and emotional connections between apparent strangers.

  • Avanti!

    “Avanti!” is inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings: as an idealistic young man, a romantic, a father, and a revolutionary. Throughout the work I explore themes of translation and research. What happens in the shift from detached researcher to impassioned participant? “Avanti!” considers what we lose when we reduce a person to only their thinking, when we abstract them from their lives. Image description: Blurry black-and-white close-up of a person’s face, yelling or laughing (?), with eyes closed and open mouth.

  • Girl from Moush

    “Girl from Moush” is a poetic montage of the artist’s journey through her subconscious Armenia. It is not an Armenia based in a reality, but one which appears, like the mythical city of Shangri La, when one closes one’s eyes. Rooted in what Jung may call a “communal consciousness,” her Armenia appears on film as a collage of myth, legend, experience and immigration. In her memoir, Gariné reveals a longing which is visualized but yet never solidly based in our reality. Icons of Armenia appear on the screen for only a second, and then disappear from both the viewer’s and…

  • Even the Sun Practices Time

    A bedtime story for the chronically aging. — In “Even the Sun Practices Time” I am exploring the creative possibilities and limitations of misunderstanding, as well as ways of communicating with the empirically absent, divine or earthly. I bring together multiple found footage sources to listen across purposes, forming a kind of speculative listening. My hope is that the film becomes a kind of third space that allows me to access a place outside of forgiveness and condemnation. Found footage gives me a collaborator. I am working with this footage not to decontextualize it, or detourn it, but to have…

  • Abandon!Abandon!

    A brief, silent investigation into ways of writing time. What do technologies ask of me?

  • Electric Water

    This experimental documentary is a meditation on the poetics and politics of water, moving between the filmmaker’s personal heritage from the Adriatic Sea and the Haudenosaunee perspective on Niagara Falls. While our connection to water is disrupted by pollution, dams, and the tourist’s gaze, there are stories and sights that lead back to water’s power and teachings. Image description: Several figures stand silhouetted against a large rushing water fall (Niagara Falls).

  • Wood and Metal Bars

    A meditative experience through colour, form, and sound. The animation was created by painting ink directly onto 16mm film. This music video was created for Toronto chamber music composer Frank Horvat. The musical composition is performed by Canadian percussionist Beverley Johnston. Image description: An abstract image featuring blue tones in various textures, with a black-outlined circular shape in the centre and bright pink blotches at the bottom.