Mother in All Your Disguises is a world contained in a short film, a book of stories, a series of prints, and a collection of marionettes and miniatures. It was created during a year-long residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace program, and has been screened at Poets' House, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Mana Contemporary. It is the first film in the Violent Mercies trilogy.

I'm interested in the paradoxes of domesticity and wildness as they manifest themselves in a mother-daughter relationship, and in the isolation of life in rural America. Mother in All Your Disguises is a kind of Western, where the dangers of the frontier are replaced with the terrors of intimacy, desire, and responsibility. Painting universal anxieties with an epic brush, the project's expansive treatment of love and landscape fuels a reimagining of the body and its terrors. 

When my work moves between abstraction, realism, poetry, and image, it does so with a desire to understand how these impulses inform each other. Anyone who’s been in the Mojave in summer knows that the heat is so visceral, so dizzying, that it passes into the surreal, the abstracted. Mirages appear on the highway, Joshua trees raise their arms in prayer, motel swimming pools suddenly seem like a good idea. 

The film is a jumping-off point for a multiplicity of stories, each of its scenes leaving the door open for a narrative that complements, contradicts, or expands upon the last. In the text, I explore the relationships between the film's characters with a fluidity of form that reflects the essence of felt experience. The stories in the collection are about mothers who transform into wild animals, juvenile delinquents who take care of their grandmothers, desert magic collected from motel sheets, and what really happens when you cut off a rattail. You can read them here.