Some Older Videos, Now Online...

A friend recently asked why I didn't have most of my videos up on the site, and the only reason I could think of was that the ones I haven't posted are "old", and will potentially get cycled out as I continue to upload new work. After all, I'm pretty focused on this animal attack theme right now (and have a couple of new spin-offs from that in the works), and the stuff from a few years back starts to look distant quick. But it seemed silly not to make them available anyhow, as they are still influential on the work I'm doing currently.

I've compressed and uploaded two of them. "Approaching", which I did with Ally Reeves in 2003, has been edited down to a couple of the more intriguing scenes. Considering the original is just over 32 minutes long, I figured a quick highlight was in order. In retrospect it's a really drawn out video, but it was never meant to be watched beginning to end in the first place.



I've also uploaded the slug self-portrait, something which I shot on the fly in 2003 when I found a slug hauling itself across the floor of my living room while working on my roommate's computer. It is, in many ways, a piece which I think other people enjoy more than I do, although perhaps that's because I'm not so comfortable with self-portraiture these days - or maybe because slugs just don't really gross me out all that much.



In one of my more shining moments in print, Pittsburgh City Paper's former art critic Greggory Knepp took a hot minute to bring his trademark sophistication to the table in a review of a show the slug video appeared in at SPACE gallery in 2006:

"It's more "eww" than "ah," and more a Jackass audition than an aesthetic gesture."

Having made a name for himself as a writer who took pot shots at young contemporary artists from behind the walls of a generally liberal corporate weekly paper, Knepp's name curiously stopped appearing in the "Art" section after he blew a little too much ink belittling artists whose work made him uncomfortable. I was certainly not the only one to draw his ire during his time at City Paper... but hey, no hard feelings Greg! Water under the bridge...