RECENT FILM WORK

When I first showed a friend a small series of self portraits I had done on film, the word she used to describe the feeling she got from them was ambivalence. It caught me off guard, not because she was wrong, but rather because she was right. There’s a messiness to film that my nature struggles against, but that I have also come to love; the not knowing, the graininess, the fragility of it. After a few rolls I actually started to sort of crave these things, welcoming light leaks and even inviting in some imperfections: shooting too wide or too slow; making soft, long-exposure self portraits; being sloppy with the development. It’s an exercise in letting go of the idea of a clean and perfect image, and instead finding rhythm dancing with the unknown and unpredictable. There’s definitely a bit of an ambivalence in the process, a state of being half in and half out that sometimes mirrors my own life: my body in one place, my heart and mind another.