This installation was my culminating studio thesis project at RISD (alongside my written thesis, “For A Moment”). It’s an immersive room-size composition in video, optical glass, and music.

On one wall is a massive, rear-projected video of a sublime and unstable seascape that I shot on the wintry Atlantic coast, blinking on and off with a warm, artificial thump. The other three walls hold five poplar wood shelves, each with one or two handmade glass objects sunken into a slab of cement. I designed the optics of the glass carefully so that each one would catch or refract light in a different way. There’s a little video screen embedded in each shelf that fills the glass with moving imagery: a collage of original and archival family footage. Some of the glass lenses appear to hold a little pool of video, some break up the image into kaleidoscopic multiples, in another the video is twirled around the point of a cone.

Each glass/video/cement shelf is choreographed with one instrument in the four-channel surround soundtrack. In the room, each instrument is mapped such that the sound seems to emanate from its corresponding glass object. The composition loops every six minutes.

Conceptually, "Unfamiliar" was inspired by the uncanny terrain of memory and its relationship to focus and presence. I dug into three generations of family recordings, and shot hours of barely-moving footage of the natural world to get at the strangeness of what we choose to remember. I wanted to capture something of how it feels to focus closely, listen attentively, and be absolutely present in strange and unknown territory, whether that’s the wilderness of mountains and trees or the inner wilds of family and ancestry.