Notes on fluorescence (installation view and stills), 2018. Single-channel video, 13 min 20 seconds. Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, CA.
“Notes on fluorescence” is a video work interested in questions of mourning, voice, accumulations, mediascapes, and time: geological time, the very limited time that individual humans exist on earth, and the ways in which compressed notions of time manifest in an environment besieged by endless extractions and waste byproducts of overconsumption, both in the US and abroad. Drawing on the research of Drs. TJ Demos and Mel Y. Chen, this work seeks to interrogate a U.S. media-mediated reading of Chinese “toxicity” and pollution, while also observing the migration of the media image between cultural contexts and the linkages between environment and body. The work is a movement through different spaces that I consider home: there are scenes of my 93-year-old grandmother playing piano while singing and laughing at herself and of my grandfather standing amidst the wild rooftop garden he has cultivated since 1985.
I originally developed this video as a talk for a symposium at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2018) and was later commissioned to adapt it into a video essay for an exhibition in San Francisco as part of the Global Climate Action Summit.
This work has been exhibited and screened at AIR Gallery (New York, NY, 2020), Field Projects (New York, NY, 2019), Artists' Television Access (San Francisco, CA, 2019), and the Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco, CA, 2018).