artist statement

For years, I have been interested in the fictions we mistake for reality and the realities we mistake for fictions.

Forgeries, frauds, fabrications, fakes. Counterfeits, copies. Dummies, drills. Mock-ups, make believes. Reproductions, replications, re-enactments, rehearsals. Shams and simulations. Artifice and art.

As an artist, writer, and filmmaker, I often flip the gazes of mass media and surveillance technology back on themselves to examine the construction of authority, reality, and transparency. The government officials and media figures claiming to offer us unfiltered access. The courtrooms and news organizations promising neutrality and truth. The public documents and official displays of otherwise highly secretive government bureaucracies or corporations.

In the past, this work has lived on pages and screens, in white cubes, black boxes, and public payphones: essay films, disobedient electronics, speculative fictions, moving images, short stories, and tactical media.

My process is investigatory and experimental, guided by questions about how new technologies have altered our relationships to the ‘self’ and to the ‘real.’ Often, I begin with a lie, an omission, or a distraction. Sometimes, I hack into the very tools and language of powerful figures and institutions, subverting the aesthetics of truth and transparency from within. In other cases, I appropriate fragments into new narratives or contexts. I twist the figurative into the literal, tell the private stories of public events, inject poetry into documentary, materialize falseness, drop fictional versions of real people into absurd settings, and rupture existing technologies and texts, mending them to suit contrary aims. I recycle and remix, splice and stitch.

In forcing the outward-facing to look inward, I hope to build temporary spaces for solitude and spontaneity and, within them, fleeting moments for reflection and resistance.

“Technology COMPAS Visual Arts Contest,” cehv.osu.edu. 2019.
Fischer, Jim. "Arts Preview: 'Cinema, Expanded,'" Columbus Alive. Nov. 20, 2018.
"Artifacts from the Bowling Green Massacre," The Daily Trumpet. Jul. 24, 2018.
"If This Art Could Vote - Public Privacy Hotline by Emily Greenberg," huffingtonpost.com. Aug. 4, 2016.
Social Justice: It Happens to One, It Happens to All.  New York: Gutfreund Cornett Art, 2016. Print.
"I Breathe with You: Part II," Exhibition catalog. Umass.edu. 2016.
Gauss, Daniel. "Democracy in America?" Wall Street International. Feb. 3, 2016.
What's Right, What's Left: Democracy in America. New York: Gutfreund Cornett Art, 2016. Print.
"Public Privacy Hotline," somervilleartscouncil.org. 2015.