Last summer I was inspired by an ad for an analog animating class hosted by Dogbotic, which prompted me to pick up my stylus and doodle one quickly as a promo for an event I was doing. What began as a charming one-off 5 frame animation turned into a collection of 5 complete looping animations within the next six months. I didn't make them for any special intent, it was just something that I enjoyed experimenting with, with the attempts to push myself past the limitations of the previous one by trying a new style, brush or color palette.

As luck would have it, around Halloween I won a free Dogbotic class from a raffle I entered, so I decided to take the one on analog animating. One week I wasn't able to complete the traditional stop-motion blackboard assignment, so I did it digitally. It was a rush job, like I liked the concept and the style, I wasn't happy with the ending and it didn't loop - which is my favorite quality to animating short form work. After I showed it in class, I decided to rework it - something I hadn't done with any of the others I had made. I ended up doubling the length of it and fell in love with the ending, because nothing goes hand in hand quite like hot dogs and kite flying : ) When I wrapped the final edits, I saw Agitator Gallery was hosting an animation showcase, so again as luck would have it - I had amassed an entire visual compilation, however it lacked the full immersion that a good soundtrack brings. So I set out to correct that.

I have a synth cave where my entire collection lives, but this time I wanted to challenge myself with a different workflow. Sometimes having too many options can slow down ideation, so I tried different approaches I haven't ever toyed with - I used only two portable synths to compose the entire score, recorded it with my voice recorder and worked upstairs where I usually paint. It was the best decision I could've made!

I wrapped recording with about 15 minutes of sound and gave that to my partner chop up and sync to the different animations. It's funny/befuddling to think how much finessing goes into syncing up a fourth of an hour of bleeps and bloops to a minute and a half of footage. Even though the ratio is big, there was still footage that wasn't scored, so I did another round of recording for about 7 minutes and finally assigned a sound for every moment.

There are two ways to score a film, start with the footage and make music and sounds specifically for each moment OR create many sonic swatches, pull from that and splice it all together. I like to score with the ladder workflow, I think it injects a lot of spontaneity and opens the doors to having many more a-ha! moments than anything I could've prescribed and purposefully tried to define. I call these moments of serendipity "puppet magic," even if I'm not working on on a puppet show. The roots of puppet magic are found when something artistically comes together perfectly without meticulous planning: a quick cut without a template that fits like a glove, a mistake that turns out better than what was intended, or discovering a movement you didn't build for but looks effortless and purposeful.

That being said, in this case, I'm not naive or discrediting that much of the magic pumped into my short filmmaking process is conjured by the hands of my partner who is one of the best editors in the industry. (this isn't a bias because he's so handsome, his impressive CV backs this up) We make a really great team and making short films together is one of my favorite art forms because collaborating with him is so fun and he makes my footage look like a billion bucks. He's super supportive of my art career and always invested in my creative process, no matter how obscene the timeline may be. I'm really lucky he's an editor because if he wasn't I would have made 0 short films in my adult life, that part of the workflow frustrates me to no end and brings me no joy - so our director/editor combo is really a dream come true <3

Come check out the Agitator Animation where my scored compilation of animations will debut on Saturday, February 3rd from 6 - 10p at Agitator Gallery in Chicago!

I'll be debuting my animations one by one on my House of Egregious instagram soon, and then after I'll put my compilation to my Short Films page.

Hi friends and fans, I shot my longest film to date: Newspaper Headlines Omit Queer Joy! Since I usually work in the genre of micro movies, I consider this work that clocks in at 24 minutes to be my first full-length film. Would you believe we did it in under one week's time? What if I told you we did it while simultaneously going through a financial colonoscopy and signing our life away during the home buying process? Because I cannot!! That's right, I went from 0 - 100 on an idea that was completely unplanned before I learned about a filmmaking grant opportunity that was too good to pass up.

To say I'm very tired doesn't begin to cover it, so I'm going to try and nap for a hundred years and when I wake up, I'll tell you all about the incredible cast I worked with and all the flaming hot cheetos it took to finish this on time. Oh, and how my VPN almost prohibited me from being able to upload the film with seven minutes to spare before the deadline.

This one is dedicated to the lovely queers who shared their definitions of queer joy and how they experience it daily. It's a vast, beautiful, honest, sexy, intersectional, explicit, harrowing account of the current condition of our community at large. Almost every letter of LGBTQIA+ is represented and includes multi-ethnic, disabled, neurodivergent and immunocompromised and COVID long-haul babes. My heart is so full by the large swatch of representation this film embodies, our community deserves nothing less. Like the title states, newspaper headlines don't celebrate queer joy and spread harmful homophobic and transphobic rhetoric (we're looking at you NYT!). This is our fight back, we deserve so much more than the crumbs we are given. It's my favorite project to date and I can't wait to share it with you later this year once we're able to make some adjustments with a longer timeline.

​Also, I wanted to fundraise for it but couldn't because during the home buying process you can't accept any financial gifts without documenting them and having them count towards your house goals, which this is entirely separate from. I'll share more on how you can donate to support this film, the gear purchased for it and to cover the stipends paid to talent closer to the release date.

​By and large, the pandemic stole my caché of whimsey. As a disabled artist, navigating daily life in a world that continues to dismiss the simple need to wear a mask to keep vulnerable communities safe is beyond soul-crushing. Living with the constant paranoia of interacting with careless, infected people has driven my partner, who is also high risk, and I to continue many of our lockdown habits, including staying home. Happy Hours in bars and restaurants have been replaced with zoom calls and hour-long phone calls. I've saved a lot of money and cut back my drinking by 90%, it's a win/win; though I do miss the appetizers. 

​I've also learned which friendships are made to endure, because I can't do much with  able-bodied people have the luxury of saying "I'm done with zoom calls. I have zoom fatigue, I'm over them." Leveraging phone and video calls enable chronically-ill and disabled people to connect with friends, family and health care providers safely and efficiently, especially in the month of December when the desire to keep close with loved ones is at an all-time high, on par with hospital capacity due to RSV, flu and COVID patients. 

What I miss is meeting new people at gallery shows, concerts, queer events and house parties. Most of all I miss performing, traveling, seeing theater and symphonies. Art & music making, hiking and telescoping keep me busy enough, and my friends are bomb af so there's nothing I'm thirsting for interpersonally. However what I've been lacking since I had to cancel my retrospective tour to Italy in spring of 2020 is the bliss of having dreams to work towards and manifest.

Early this fall, we decided we were ready for a change. If we were going to be indoors all the time, it should be in a house with an epic backyard instead of an apartment with a shared backyard. I've wrestled with the capacity of my return to live performance for almost three years now, and the unending frustration over risk assessment in order to do it equitably and safely made me give up trying. Equity is really important to me, it's non-negotiable and I have no hesitation in walking away if a steep downturn should occur. No opportunity is worth it to me if the people who promise to protect me and keep me safe squelch on the deal. At this point in my career, fifteen years in, I know my thresholds, and they've been weakened so drastically by the blatant disregard for chronically ill and disabled lives that I ran out of fucks to give years ago. 

Before my diabetes diagnosis in 2019, I was out there licking telephone poles with the rest of them. Freebasing germs on the red line was a Saturday night delight. Now my partner and I chose our health and safety over all other options, at the expense of my creative career, and if we do take the risk - it's been well assessed and we boost our protocol to be better prepared. I figured since I wasn't going to be performing in anyone else's shows, I shouldn't host my work on other people's platforms either - that's how I arrived at the decision to retire my Substack and only publish my work on my own site. It felt like there was no way for me to dream big when the requirements for traditional success are very inaccessible for neurodivergent, chronically ill and disabled people: in-person promo events, traveling to gigs, conventions, galas, dinners, award shows, class presentations, festivals y mas. 

Therefore, I had grown content with becoming a reclusive seaside witch that keeps a private art practice and falls deep into healing, meditative trances. The business takes a lot out of you, because when you're not hauling ass on a project, you are beating yourself up for not doing a project or not doing more with your "free time" (as if merely existing isn't productive enough), and doing more is a never ending, expansive task. If you think about the purpose of our basic humanity, it has nothing to fucking do with branding, schedules or tumeric lattes and has everything to do with regulating your nervous system, deep belly breath, walking in nature and connecting wit your community. Moving to a beachside town has given me a dream, for the first time in years, that I can fantasize about and work towards. Moving to a new state is thrilling and romantic and terrifying and deliciously exciting. I've only ever known Chicago as the center of my universe my entire life, which is why I've done so much traveling; to say my heart is breaking is an understatement. I already miss here and I'm still here, I believe this is when the old adage "no pain, no gain" becomes relevant. 

Losing the ability to be a dreamer took a much larger toll on me than I had realized. Pre-pandemic, all my big life goals were made as an able-bodied person who was somewhat tolerant of absolute fuckshit from producers and collaborators for the sake of booking the gig, to stack my CV, to prepare me for the next asshole who was going to be leading the bigger project with a bigger budget. Going to art school gives you a preview of this, it prepares you to bite the curb until someone rescues you, uplifts you and pulls a chair up at the table for you. And don't me started on learning the ugly truths about all the elite art and culture orgs I had one day hoped to collaborate with or be featured at. It seemed all the momentum I had worked so hard for over twelve years to generate was falling by the wayside.

A funny thing happens when you're an artist who has been at it for as long as I have, you make repeated attempts at leaving the scene - only to be yanked back in. It seems the more adamant you are about leaving, the more dramatically you get dragged back into they fray. This happened me recently when the very kind Sarah Shaw recommended Food Over Function via her new Substack: Found Objects a week and a half after I wrote what I was planning to be my last post. It's a blessing to have people who believe in you when you want to throw in the towel. Keep an eye out for a new Substack post soon!

Then I decided to apply to The One Minutes - Rest Hard: an act of doing nothing in a safe company By Party Office. This gave me the creative challenge I was craving, which lead me to make An Abundance of Lavender, a short film that I shot, directed and scored + edited by my partner. I wrapped on it tonight and feel absolutely electric when I watch it. Can't wait to debut it next week! It's my first film in three years and the very first time I've ever composed my own score, the process of which will get its own blog because it was a wild and fun experience. I forgot how happy filmmaking makes me and can't wait to do more. I think my next one is going to be about tasting menus! 

Thanks for sticking with me through the ups and the downs this year. For the first time in a long while, it doesn't feel like all the doors are closing because I continue to prioritize my wellbeing over my career. The equitable opportunities I once could only dream about are finally finding their way to me and it feels really good to have my head in the clouds again. She's bringing whimsey back.