I am a writer and artist fixated on using a camera to try and answer my questions. Moving image moves me. In my work, I reckon with how we can know the particulars or characteristics of a landscape but not know the landscape at all. I am infatuated with and desperate to understand decaying places, with a particular interest in the unkempt physical and temporal residues of human infrastructure. I explore the allocations of space in systems of suppression, injustice, and dislocation. My mediums include installation and moving image, which act in conversation to obscure reality and recall violations and scars inflicted on landscapes by institutions of oppression.
This Has Always Been a Portal is twofold.
The first, a single channel short film documenting the landscape and visitation check-in room at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. Never able to enter, and always on the peripheral, the film experiments with the room’s reality through narration that recounts the processes of visiting an incarcerated loved one.
The second, a multimedia installation of the room itself; the fleeting and unstable nature of memory physicalized through the structural design. Relying on sensory and spatial residues to guide me, the room is built on my memories alone.
Together these works speak to landscapes on the fringe of carceral and civilian life and detail the spatial record that is left behind through the movements of bodies in these passthrough, temporary spaces.