No one can prepare you for motherhood; of course I had heard the clichés from every side, that it was a lot of work, that one could (or couldn’t) have it all, that my priorities would have to change, that it would be the best thing that ever happened to me. However, there was a failure to communicate how I could simultaneously feel so deeply fulfilled by and connected to this primal state of being a mother, and yet feel so disconnected to my former childless self. The culture doesn’t support the narrative of how motherhood can feel isolating, suffocating and depleting, nor does it allow for the associated guilt for having such ambivalent feelings. I marveled at how the profound mother child relationship could be so conflicted and complicated. Gazelle is the performance of these complex themes. Tony Little, “America’s Personal Trainer” and infomercial regular, is the motivator relentlessly haranguing me to feats of endurance. He serves as an absurd running commentary, and as a manifestation of a certain kind of cultural disconnect. The Gazelle –machine-animal and woman, acts as a mirror to my own wife, mother, and artist conflict.

Over the course of four years, I recorded video footage of teenage girls from a Queens, New York high school practicing and performing a step dance routine in the time signature 4/4. This footage was used to create a single, seamless audio-visual performance that shows the dancers in formation using their hands and feet to communicate and perform a highly expressive, non-verbal exhibition of rhythm, strength, sight, and sound.

In 1945 Harold Schaffer proposed to Peggy Riley; three days later he left for the United States Navy to serve his country during World War II. While stationed far from home as an active duty sailor, Harry obsessively wrote over a hundred letters to Peggy, often writing three to four times a week. These remarkably earnest love letters, which were written over the course of ten months in 1945 and 1946 serve as the source material for “My Dearest Darling Peggy”. In this video, a cross section of contemporary men recite passages from Harry’s letters, performing within the safe space of a domestic interior while pretending to be writing from a ship’s deck. These men live between two states, expressing a world that is both real and imagined. The readers are as vulnerable today as Harry was sixty years ago. The anxieties, fears, longing, faith and desires of a man who is amidst a violent world that is forever changing is revealed through poignant passages that expose an historical expression of masculinity in both the past and the present. Harry and Peggy are my maternal grandparents.

King, Queens, New York is the dissonant fusion of two American male icons; Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra found on the streets of Queens, New York. Through sound editing, both Frank Sinatra and an Elvis impersonator sing the popular tune of New York New York at an Italian festival. The two versions of the song are sung and played in different keys, while a weathered and aged Elvis performs to an equally weathered and aged audience, creating a flawed collision of two American icons.