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My art practice involves several mediums: I began my artistic career as a book artist and, in manyways, aspects of bookmaking carry over into filmmaking in terms of creating a narrative through the sequencing of images. My poetry and prose frequently provide the narrative structure of my experimental films and installations. Additionally, there is a performance component to my work involving spoken word and Argentine tango which I have studied since 1995.

In all of these endeavors, poetry, film and performance, I am investigating ideas about love and loss, faith and longing in attempt to capture what is both beautiful and fleeting. Indeed, the primary activity of my work is an effort to distill, slow down, observe, remember and recover these fleeting moments. Something about this kind of reflection lends the work a, perhaps, unavoidable melancholy feeling.

I can say, unabashedly, that I rely heavily on classical ideas of beauty; I find using landscapes, figures and objects a powerful and, frankly, more pleasant way of addressing the provisional.  Indeed, I am a cultivator of both beauty and feeling in language and visual art as a kind of defiance of irony and what I feel to be the ultimate emptiness of irony.

In a similar vein, I am aiming for emotional authenticity and realness; I frequently use autobiography toward that end. In poetry that is easily accomplished but in film, I might try to achieve this through the careful creation and documentation of an event and, in the editing process, I am careful not to disrupt what I feel is the natural energy of that moment captured on film.

I recently completed a collaborative film with Atlanta filmmaker Blake Williams. Titled “Wishes”, it uses performance, spoken word, and Argentine tango music and dance to explore ideas about wish fulfillment and the way that happy endings function within a narrative and affect the experience of the audience. The second project, in collaboration with Mark Leibert, explores ideas of transformation with Ovid’s Metamorphosis as its inspiration.

Studio Artist Program benefit:

Sadly, I have not had a space dedicated solely to my own artistic production since I closed the printmaking studio component of Circle B Press in 2002. Focusing much of my artistic practice on writing and filmmaking allows me to work anywhere. Not having a studio, however, does not allow room for experimentation for installation work and other collaborative projects that I hope to pursue. A designated studio would allow for both psychic and physical space.

To participate within a community of artists would be a joy! I think I would positively relish the opportunity to be in close proximity to other artists for the sake of feedback, cross pollination, collaboration and fellowship. Some twenty years ago, my first real participation in the Atlanta art community was through a lengthy (2 years!) internship at Nexus Press. That early experience shaped my development as an artist. I was a long-time supporter of Nexus Press as a center for experimental ways of considering the book. I would hope that having a studio at the center would be equally enlightening.

Community involvement:

For the past two years, I have facilitated a film discussion group for the Atlanta Film Festival organized thematically: twisted love and other curiosities, Viva La Revolucion! class consciousness, the power elite and revolution, and auteurs. The discussion group brings together a wide assortment of folks all interested in retrospective cinema. In some ways, the discussions that I curate are a form of political engagement: I don’t pretend that they are free from my particular form of liberal partisanship.

On another front, however, I have been organizing, in earnest, a post-partisan lecture series in collaboration with the Martin Luther King National Historic Site called Big Ideas Better World. Big Ideas Better World is lecture and performance series bringing artists, writers, scientists, performers, entrepreneurs, innovators and once ordinary individuals to share their stories of their lives work and what led them to lives of action in solving the world’s problems. Simply, the series hopes to inspire ordinary audiences to do extraordinary things. Its focus is on social justice and it aims to honor the legacy of Dr. King and galvanize our community in the task of tikkun olam or repair of the world. Through the shared goals of Big Ideas Better World, we have attracted renown local and national figures to our advisory board.

I continue to study and perform Argentine Tango within our little Atlanta community. Like the film discussion group, this community is incredibly diverse and I take great pride in my affiliation with it. My past involvement in the Atlanta arts community includes serving on the boards of directors of the High Museum’s Twentieth Century Art Society and Art Papers magazine. While serving on the Art Papers board, I originated the Art Papers Live! series that presents artists, architects, critics, and curators in dialogue bringing the award-winning content of the magazine directly to Atlanta audiences. As programmer for that series, some our guests of honor included Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, artist Kara Walker, Jeffrey Kipnis, Curator of Architecture and Design at the Wexner Center for the Arts, notable art critic Hal Foster, Robert Irwin, designer of the gardens at the Getty Museum and Prof. T. Minh-ha, filmmaker and theorist.

Additionally, for two years, I was the Manager of Youth and Family Services at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. During my tenure there, I planned and implemented an extensive, multi-disciplinary art program focused on the permanent collections of the Museum.  I currently exhibit my work at Whitespace Gallery.