From my earliest editing experiments as a teenager, I would delight in the magic that occurs when joining together pieces of film. Two separate shots, each of which by itself might be flat, lifeless, or mundane, when cut together will vibrate with poetry and expressive force. My editing career is bu.... More

From my earliest editing experiments as a teenager, I would delight in the magic that occurs when joining together pieces of film. Two separate shots, each of which by itself might be flat, lifeless, or mundane, when cut together will vibrate with poetry and expressive force. My editing career is built on this kind of transmutation.

When I create video art, my editor's instinct to gather, re-arrange and transform is very much in play. I collect whatever detritus catches my attention--snatches of dialog, an architectural detail, an odd photo in the newspaper--and mix them up in the editing room. I'll play around with motion and repetition, pattern and texture, color and rhythm and graphic arrangement, as well as layers of sound. I try to discover interesting correspondences, and hopefully tease out a new metaphor or insight, or reveal a hidden essence. I know a work is finished when it takes on an a kind of transcendent luster, an aura that glows brighter than the sum of its prosaic parts.

I'll generally start a piece without preconceived ideas about how these appropriated materials fit together, or of what meanings may emanate from their juxtaposition. Often, though, the work reflects my concerns about how the media environment infiltrates and frames our consciousness, and how the human qualities of attention, perception, and memory are evolving in parallel with modern technological life.

Much of my work is time-based collage, and in that sense owes a debt to the great collage and assemblage artists of the last century: Schwitters, Cornell, Nevelson, and Rosenquist, as well as film collagists Bruce Connor, James Broughton, and Stan Vanderbeek. I draw inspiration from all of these, as well as from the pop-culture realms of musical remix and video mash-up. Close