Ground/Glass, 2008
TRT 4:25, color video with sound
Ground/Glass is an attempt to use a cave as an optical instrument for exploring light and the landscape. Within this cave a person’s eyes dilate and adjust to the darkness revealing the character of the cave while simultaneously the view to the outside sunlit landscape appears increasingly obscured, veiled in broad daylight. This video is an exploration of this inversion while considering the austere yet ornate structure of the cave. The imagery is layered with views through broken beer bottle shards and an intermittent 360° pan using a bicycle wheel that also functions as an audio component.

780,000,000 Miles Away, 2009
TRT 7:13, color video, silent
The activity of looking / the perception and sensation of light / the apparatus that facilitates vision (ie eyeball, telescope, hilltop) / the constant tethering of light to legibility / and the strange experience of light collected and condensed to extend vision. I was told Saturn was 780 million miles away the night I peered through the huge telescope on the rooftop of the Griffith Observatory. Inside the observatory, dioramas reveal what has been learned from scrutinizing the sky; outside the observatory, there is a monument to historical figures of astronomy: Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler. And also, as a reminder of the prominence
of film industry in Los Angeles, there is a bronze bust of James Dean. This sculpture commemorates "the ties of the film industry to Griffith Observatory" while memorializing the star of the 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause.

postcard,2009
One from an ongoing series of photographs of particular details of a cave in Griffith Park. The Open Studio gallery functions as another viewing apparatus not unlike a telescope. Images are manifest in this corridor, a record of a distant landscape.

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Both of these videos are shot primarily in Griffith Park, a large public park in Los Angeles that is the home of the Griffith Park Observatory, the large white "Hollywood" sign, the city zoo, museums, etc but it is so expansive that there are also areas only developed to the extent that a fire road has been ploughed or a foot trail follows a ridge line. The observatory houses a planetarium for light shows about the universe, as well as a museum of educational dioramas about our solar system, and a huge telescope in a domed section of the roof. The building is a prominent location in the narrative of the 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause starring James Dean and Natalie Wood, a romantic drama about high school teenagers that go on a school field trip to see a matinee show in the planetarium.

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Perkinje's Tree, Jan Evangelista Purkyne (b. 1787 - 1869)
A visual phenomenon in which a person sees into his or her own eyes. When a bright light is directed towards the white of the eyeball it causes glowing shadows to appear across a person's vision. These are the blood vessels that line the retina's surface and they have a branching, tree-like structure. This is something you often experience during an eye exam when the optometrist inspects the condition of your retina.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Regulus, 1828 This painting is based on the historical account of the Roman General Marcus Atilius Regulus who was tortured and executed by the Carthaginians in 250 BC. Regulus was locked in darkness, then his eyelids were slit off, and then he was taken out into broad daylight to see the world. The Turner painting shows a panorama of a city with a low horizon line and a sky full of yellow light that encroaches onto the buildings and landscape. Turner's painting offers a severe reconsideration of the role of sunlight

Stan Brakhage, Arabics 1-19, 1980-82
I have seen a selection from this series of nineteen films which appear to show shapes oflight against a black ground, pulsing and moving constantly in a space that is indeterminate, shifting from endlessly deep to a flattened foreground and back again. The films are silent, non-representational, and provide an experience of light that seems completely removed from subject matter or source.