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Statement
My work comes from conversation and community with other disabled artists, my personal experience of providing and depending on others for care, and living with a heart condition.
In my videos, I collaborate with participants in recording audio description and writing captions, integrating access work into the process of shooting, writing, and editing. The provision of access raises questions of what can be shown; how images mediate the treatment and medicalization of disability; and how medical systems, documentary films, and legal protections frame disability, access, and life itself in terms of their surplus value.
Questioning documentary forms, I propose alternatives to standard-issue contracts like “access agreements,” used to secure participants’ consent to appear in a documentary, which offload risk onto participants and produce value for some, while writing others out of the possibility of being compensated. Instead, I work to not only share risk with participants but also enumerate and compensate the labor of living with appearing in a documentary.
I’m also interested in other mechanisms that mediate access to (the) life (of an artwork) but are often thought of as mere framing devices or external to it: relationships, references, day jobs, press releases, dates, institutional websites, the news, earlier edits of the same video, etc.
Access work makes explicit how art is framed, including how the meaning of images and sounds depend on the partialities, interests, and ideological worldviews of access workers and audiences. In thinking about this, my recent work asks how description might be a means of examining and fighting against ableist, racist, and nationalist propaganda and disinformation.
Video/Still Samples
Shared Resources
2021
HD video
98 min.
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Expressions
2021
HD video
36 min.
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An All-Around Feel Good
HD video
2023-4
27 min.
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Concealed and Denied
HD video
35 min
2025
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Live Recording
ongoing press releases
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Documentary Participation Agreement
paper print-outs available for takeaway, PDF contract template
2023-4 |
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Fire Sale (2012-2018)
2021
metal shelving, spreadsheet, books and PDFs free for takeaway
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The Voice of Democracy
installation view
2023
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