Animation is the expression of internal realities and, as such, it is uniquely suited to unmasking subtexts and revealing unconscious landscapes. With a childhood history among psychoanalysis, a university focus on neuroscience, a spiritual turn toward mindfulness, and a long career in cinema education, I approach filmmaking as a conceptual art with a focus on mind and heart.
Similar to using a microscope, I use animation as a tool for insight – observing and understanding reality. Instead of a material investigation, animation is a psychic examination focused inward on the actions of mind instead of the substance of matter. Animation is an inversion of the microscope: rather than collecting realities like a camera, animation casts reality outward like a projector.
Conceptualizing reality as experience allows my films to work as a mythopoeic collage practice, a process of rearranging the elements of personal and cultural experience into documentary storyline. My projects begin by mining my own experience and conditions for the seeds of narrative. Re-planted frame-by-frame, they grow into films under the light of conscious awareness and non-judgement.
While stories may be the roots of our humanity, I believe mindful attention is the energy for wisdom. Film is a conceptual art, and viewership is a constructivist activity. As a film grows in the audience’s mind, that is where I position my work, pollinating, digging, planting, and harvesting ideas and images in open collaboration with the viewer. I believe art is only in collaboration with it’s audience, human to human, mind to mind.
