Cutting Room Floor #1 (Carroll Family), 2024
Cutting Room Floor #2 (Fethke Family), 2024
Cutting Room Floor #3 (Kumanomido Family), 2024

The Cutting Room Floor video essays are a subset of the work we turn to time, is an immersive four channel video installation with sound that premiered at Alexander Gray Associates in June 2025. These videos are footnotes of the larger film project, and feature unused footage from the larger four-channel film. 

These works are a part of my long-term project, Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place (2018-2024), a poetic study of the family unit with a sub-focus on mixed-race families in the U.S. These works borrow from the visual language of family home movies and photo albums to capture the profound and everyday lives of the participating families.

The video essays incorporate new, self-documented video footage taken by multigenerational, mixed-race families from across the U.S.: the Carroll family (Twin Cities, MN), the Fethke family (Woodbury, NY), and the Kumanomido family (St. Louis, MO). Each family contributed footage from two days of gathering, including birthday parties, holidays, or simple family dinners. These windows into intimate scenes counter the representation throughout American history of the mixed-race body as either a disaster or as a kind of magic. The works resist the binaries of tragic/magic, choosing instead to engage with the idea of mixture as fundamentally American. The stills and films capture some of these nuanced, intimate moments.

The voiceover that accompanies the video essays draws from my lecture-performance THIS IS A FILM (2017-20), exploring the truths and fictions that intermingle in family archives. The corresponding wall works incorporate language from Wayfinding (2019-22), a project exploring familial emotional intimacy and its place in public space. Both THIS IS A FILM and Wayfinding are also subprojects of Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place. The combined elements, exhibited together in this way for the first time, invite meditation both on gaps in the dominant American archive of the family and how self-perception is molded through familial relationships as the first encounter with collective social engagement.