Utility Black (2 screen version) (2011)

"Since the mid 1990s, I began a loose video diary of my neighborhood, the East Village in Lower Manhattan as it was undergoing serious gentrification, not dissimilar to other parts of Brooklyn and Queens boroughs. I was drawn to the lives of those living in the margins against the hyped, celebrity culture most often portraying this city.

'Utility Black (2)' uses methods of splitting images between interior and exterior realities to emphasize the clash between the lives of tenants and the exterior political and financial circumstances that impose themselves onto the lives of these individuals. Various sources of materials intermingle from newspaper clippings, to documentary footage, to restaged real stories of fellow residents of my tenement building on East 8th Street with elements of the fantastical and absurd."