This suite of videos addresses personal and family history, in part, dealing with the implications of being the only sibling of five not to have inherited Polycystic Kidney Disease, a genetic disorder that generally leads to kidney failure in middle age. In these works, I explore the body as a site both of beauty and abjection.

SUITE consists of five shorts: MY FATHER'S LEGS (1997-98), INTERIOR OUTPOST (2003), DOUBLE NEPHRECTOMY (1998), MOXIBUSTION (1999) and GAZELLE (1999).

SUITE: MY FATHER'S LEG (1997-98)
DV video | color | silent | 3 min
In this self-portrait I imagine the disease and pain that caused my father's death twenty-five years earlier. Having become older than he at his death, I found, in images of my own body complex feelings of love, guilt, grief and regret.

SUITE: INTERIOR OUTPOST (2003)
DV video | color | sound | 9 min
Here, my body is explicitly a screen on which I project my father's photographs of the family to articulate my position of difference within the family experience of illness and death.

SUITE: DOUBLE NEPHRECTOMY (1998)
DV video | color | sound | 4 min
This double portrait cinematically projects my sister's wound onto my own body and psyche. Shortly after she received a living donor kidney from a friend, I filmed the scar that resulted from removing both her damaged organs. This video projects that image of her two-week-old scar onto my own body, visualizing my complex feelings of knowing I have been spared the gene that caused her disease. In the video, I find, on my own body, the scars I imagine we share.

SUITE: MOXIBUSTION (1999)
DV video | color | sound | 9 min
Also a double portrait, this video is an inside-out variation on DOUBLE NEPHRECTOMY. Here, the video uses projected light to penetrate my own body picturing my sister in her trade as an acupuncturist. While she treats me through burning herbs (moxibustion) and acupuncture needling, the video treats the body as landscape. The contradiction between her commitment to an ancient healing practice and her dependence for survival on modern high technology medicine is an implicit subtext of the video.

SUITE: GAZELLE (1998)
DV video | color | sound | 3 min
This is a portrait of my wife, the artist Katy Martin in her studio painting directly on her own body while imagining a wild animal. While not centered on the theme of family disease like the other four videos, this piece does similarly explore the body as a site of beauty and abjection.