SUITE   1996-2003, color, sound and silent, 28 min.  

This suite of videos addresses personal and family history, in part, dealing with the implications of being the only sibling of five not to have inherited Polycystic Kidney Disease, a genetic disorder that generally leads to kidney failure in middle age. In these works, I explore the body as a site both of beauty and abjection. Suite includes MY FATHER'S LEG, INTERIOR OUTPOST, DOUBLE NEPHRECTOMY, MOXIBUSTION and GAZELLE.

MY FATHER'S LEG   1996-97, color, silent, 3 min.    

In this self-portrait I imagine the disease and pain which caused my father's death twenty-five years earlier. Now that I am older than he at his death, I find, in images of my own body complex feelings of love, guilt, grief and regret.    
 

INTERIOR OUTPOST   2003, color, sound, 9 min.

Here, my body is explicitly a screen on which I project photographs from the family archive to articulate my position of difference within the family experience of illness and death.

DOUBLE NEPHRECTOMY   1998, color, sound, 4 min.

This double portrait cinematically projects my sister's wound onto my own body and psyche. Shortly after she received a living donor kidney from a friend, I filmed the scar that resulted from removing both her damaged organs. This video projects that image of her two-week-old scar onto my own body, visualizing my complex feelings of knowing I have been spared the gene that caused her disease. In the video, I find, on my own body, the imagined scars we share.    

Also a double portrait, this video is an inside-out variation on DOUBLE NEPHRECTOMY. Here, the video uses projected light to penetrate my own body picturing my sister in her trade as an acupuncturist. While she treats me through burning herbs (moxibution) and acupuncture needling, the video imagines the body as landscape. The contradiction between her commitment to an ancient healing practice and her dependence for survival on high technology surgical and chemical medicine is an implicit subtext of the video.      

GAZELLE  1998, color, sound, 3 1/2 min

This is a portrait of my wife, the artist Katy Martin in her studio painting directly on her own body while imagining a wild animal. While not centered on the theme of family disease like the other three videos, this piece does also explore the body as a site of beauty and abjection.

I'M A PILOT LIKE YOU  2000, color, sound, 40 min.
Co-produced and co-directed by Ruth Hardinger

The video was shot July, 1999 inside and outside 20 North Moore Street where John Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy lived. Ruth Hardinger, a sculptor, is a 1st floor resident in this building and was unwittingly trapped by the media frenzy and the public attention that unfolded on the sidewalk in front of the building after the Kennedy plane crashed off Martha's Vineyard. Made in collaboration with Bill Brand, a nearby neighbor and experimental filmmaker, "I'm a Pilot Like You" looks through the back side of the media mirror to reflect on the clouded boundary between public and private in the weeks immediately following the fatal Kennedy accident.      

Awarded the MacArthur Chair by Hampshire College from 1994-97, Bill Brand initiated Film/Video Projects in the Community, a course that allowed small groups of students to learn documentary film/video production by undertaking real-world projects for local community groups. Three projects were completed.

DIALYSIS, LIVING WITH CHOICES, 1997, video, 15 minutes

An educational video to help dialysis patients, their families and medical providers think about and discuss end-of-life preferences

HOUSING DISCRIMIATION PROJECT, 1996, video, 8 minutes

An educational/outreach video made for the Housing Discrimination Project, a legal services organization that fights housing discrimination in western Massachusetts.

HUMAN RESOURCES UNLIMIED, video, 1995, 6 minutes

A promotional/ informational video made for the 25th Anniversary fundraising event of Human Resources, Unlimited, a social service organization that provides job placement and support services to developmentally and psychologically disabled adults in Springfield, MA.