Minders, 2025, video, 3:00

Minders connects on both medical and philosophical levels with my father's dementia, neurodegeneration, and the complexities of mind. As I read through my ailing father's library of analytic philosophy texts, I see paper clipped sections, folded pages, random objects, and nearly inscrutable margin notes, all marking information as important, useful, or something to return to. The paper clips have been in place for so long that their forms are engraved into the paper, indexes of mind, reminding, and guarding. In the video, I collage photographic stills from this growing archive of paper clips and post its, now separated from their responsibilities. Images of the top edges of my father's outstretched books are interspersed. Their oblique forms appear like flowers, papyrus, or hair. The barely visible paperclips still in place appear like dashed silver lines, revealing something “minded” in the text which is not visible to us now. The clips are a chorus moving in formation, creating a rhythm against the surrounding darkness that evokes a new language.

Usage, 2025, video, 2:15

Against a dark void, mutant letter forms appear to float in the video, Usage. Their two-dimensional forms are mergers of several characters cut-out as one. Each is then further folded back upon itself, making spherical forms. Shifting across the blank field like a malfunctioning stop-motion animation, the new letters appear to roll, fall, and build up in a pile. Here, there is no context in the blankness. No bodies engage with the letter-like blobs. The subject at the heart of this video series is witnessing my father, a former philosopher of language, start to lose his ability to speak as dementia advances. Hands may not be visible, but my process as an artist and his daughter is evident in the collaged forms and cut letters, which silently evade their former meanings.

Cling, 2025, video, 3:02

How do we, with others, come to an understanding in a shared environment? My father would often use objects on the breakfast table to explain approaches to questions like this in the philosophy of mind. Descriptions of everyday things often serve as examples to tease out problems in very dense philosophical texts. I remember describing the coffee cup as if I was being quizzed, my every word analyzed. In the video Cling, three mugs are presented, stained with the coffee my father would drink habitually in great volume. Language is represented by letters clinging to the coffee mugs, though the clarity of that (or any) reference is diminished as the letters waver and mount up in a heap. This unstable communication references not only the complexity of knowledge but also the effects of dementia. The letters are unreadable as they swarm the mugs, but they spell out a warning he gave me recently: “The daughter of the sentence will bring the death of Socrates.” Here, the “sentence” is a placeholder for “me.” Raising “death” probably acts as an anxious alarm, but also triggered memory of The Death of Socrates, a painting by Jacques-Louis David, one that we regularly stop by to view together at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Daughter of the Sentence, 2025, video, 3:05

Conversations with my father, who studied language use in relation to the philosophy of mind, have long influenced my work. Now as my father's dementia advances and aphasia sets in, the word, “sentence,” is regularly something he utters, as a frustrated placeholder for words that evade him. These moments are shown in images where his hands connect to my cut-out letters not through reading but through sensory touch. In my sculptural practice, I push and prod cut-out words that I can hold in my hands. These appear in footage of letter orbs moving through my art studio space. The title Daughter of the Sentence is born from one hard evening, when my father warned me “The daughter of the sentence will bring the death of Socrates.” This jumble of words refers to The Death of Socrates, a painting by Jacques-Louis David, that we often visit together at the Met. While his message and tone were dark when he uttered that odd sentence, there is solace that a remembrance of our last visit is compressed into his fear of disappearing.