"…the capacity of metafictional questioning to help the development of heightened consciousness…has been affirmed by the majority of critics as one of its most valuable qualities." —Karl S. Y. Kao
The Artist Statement is supposed to be about the self, and the art itself a “self-expression.” But I am threatened by the notion that Self should mean anything, in a world where it’s become everything. Immutable identity interferes with art making.
Some of my faces you can meet in my stories—they have broken fourth walls and fifth walls, they have spoken to you in the second person, they have looked their camera directly in the eye.
My work is an action: a lot of puttering around and list making, and listening very carefully to fictional characters and what they are saying about the people who love them and delivered them. My medium is manyfold, though by trade I deal in writing and filmmaking. As I write this, most of my audience is local, and connected with an immediacy that, though small, is salient and secure.
In my work I am emptying myself of the multitude of lives I have lived. Perhaps they will be a comfort to the broken lives that you have lived. They are varied. They are the lives of a girl trapped in a closet, a boy forced to trace the width of your country by catching rides on trucks, a woman with chronic pain waiting for death in a redwood forest, a mechanical someone who will never be certain if they are human, a prince who loses everything he knows and is forced to live in the world that we know—
All these lives and more—to share them in rich detail with words, to film the tragedy of them, to play the songs that would soothe them in the meantime: that’s what you might call my art. These lives are not a byproduct of anything voluntary. They are a sentence, and my work a commissary.
To be religious is an unspoken taboo in this field, and I haven’t even managed to make it look cool. But reliance on God is critical to my making anything. Oh, listen: it’s the thundering sound of a thousand worldly doors closing in our face.
