STILL BEING EDITED PLACEHOLDER TEXT
I have always had an interest in the hidden, the occult.
I used to ask myself as a child "Why is everything the way it is?".
When I first saw Stanley Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey I was about 13 years old, on a 10” black and white television, it had a deep effect on me. I discovered the film during the “Jupiter and beyond the infinite” abstract sequence and I was mesmerized. By the time the end interior room sequence featuring the alchemical transformation of the astronaut Dave Bowman, I was terrified by the unknown of the Monolith.
One of my first memories of the film before I had ever seen it was sitting on my Grandfather’s lap with an afgan his mother made over our heads and the soundtrack album open on my lap listening to the weird music and pretending we were flying in space. I remember looking at the pictures on the album and not understanding what they were.
This lead me to recognizing the power the filmic medium has for illustrating abstract concepts.
My own work reflects on the alchemical process of the transmutation of human consciousness and how our patterns of thought are transformed by the symbolic catalyst of the (apparently) external world. Film is a perfect medium for this exploration. The triad complex of our mind, body and spirit is represented by the mechanism of film perfectly. The projector-machine is akin to our body and enables the continuum of our lives to be experienced in a linear fashion. The material, photochemical nature of film, akin to our mind, forms and filters light, which is akin to spirit or pure consciousness.
My films are constructed utilizing photographed live-action, 2D artwork and transparencies which are then rephotographed using analog film special effects techniques on equipment including an Oxberry animation camera system and an optical printer in 16mm & 35mm film. Additional footage is generated by hand-painted direct-on-film techniques, ray-o-grams, and hand-processing. The resulting analog film is scanned at 5K resolution. Digital techniques such as 2D and 3D graphics are also utilized. The analog and digital footage is synthesized digitally to compose the final films.