This video essay's starting point is Canadian Bobby Clarke's infamous ankle-breaking hit of Russian player Valery Kharlamov during the 1972 Canada-Soviet Summit Series. The video examines the incongruous nature of polite Canadian identity and the violence so inherent and well-loved in hockey, touching on my own history playing hockey as a child and the positioning of the Summit victory in the political sphere at the time.
FROM DEEP
HD VIDEO, 88 MINUTES, 2013
This documentary essay examines the social, cultural, and geographical roots of basketball, charting the game's evolution from an indoor, middle class game designed for taming aggression during the New England winters, to a Midwestern small town phenomenon, to an outdoor, urban game.
FROM DEEP
HD VIDEO, 88 MINUTES, 2013
With the arrival of charismatic (and marketable stars like Dr. J, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, the NBA was lifted from its marginal status at the end of the 1970s. The Dunkadelic Era was subsequently born in 1984, with the release of Kurtis Blow's "Basketball," the first song to make a direct connection between hoops and rap, and Michael Jordan's entry into the NBA. Jordan's rise marked a turning point in professional team sports, as individual players became brands unto themselves.
FROM DEEP
HD VIDEO, 88 MINUTES, 2013
Self-shot sequences of neighborhood pickup and streetball games around the country provide poetic counterpoint to the sport’s cultural history. From the small towns of Indiana, to playgrounds in Hartford and Akron, indoor gyms in Springfield, Mass. and Louisville, improvised makeshift courts on parking and abandoned lots in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and famous outdoor blacktops like Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park and The Cage in New York.
CLEANING THE GLASS
HD VIDEO, 11 MINUTES, 2016
Exploding the video essay into a desktop documentary, Cleaning the Glass (a postscript to 2013's From Deep) considers how the relationship between sports, politics, race, and media has changed over the past half-decade in American culture.
ANYTHING BUT US IS WHO WE ARE
BURNED BASKETBALL JERSEY, VIDEO GAME CONSOLE, LIVE VIDEO GAME FEED, 2012
Professional athletes are increasingly viewed and treated as commodities by today's team owners and fans. This piece addresses the immersive environments that allow and encourage fans to feel that players are surrogates of themselves, while also addressing the speed with which virtual representations of players become outdated as they relocate to new teams based primarily on monetary and personal criteria, rather than loyalty to a given city or fan base.
GOALS
BRETT KASHMERE AND ASTRIA SUPARAK, VINYL, 2015
Vinyl floor installation superimposes the goals of the six major North American team sports into an actual-scale color field abstraction of hollow "winning."
SPORTSNATION
INSTALLATION VIEW, 2015
Solo gallery exhibition, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
BALLET AND BRUTALITY
APPLIQUED NYLON BANNER, 3' x 6', 2015
The series This Is Pro Football appropriates hyperbolic catchprhases and poetic slogans summarizing the sport from the "voice-of-god" narrations of NFL Films for a series of amateur gymnasium banners.
A GAME OF THUNDER AND DESTRUCTION
APPLIQUED NYLON BANNER, 3' x 6', 2015
The series This Is Pro Football appropriates hyperbolic catchprhases and poetic slogans summarizing the sport from the "voice-of-god" narrations of NFL Films for a series of amateur gymnasium banners.
ONE-HUNDED YARD UNIVERSE
APPLIQUED NYLON BANNER, 3' x 9', 2015
The series This Is Pro Football appropriates hyperbolic catchprhases and poetic slogans summarizing the sport from the "voice-of-god" narrations of NFL Films for a series of amateur gymnasium banners.
FROM WHISTLE TO GUN
APPLIQUED NYLON BANNER, 3' x 4.5', 2015
The series This Is Pro Football appropriates hyperbolic catchprhases and poetic slogans summarizing the sport from the "voice-of-god" narrations of NFL Films for a series of amateur gymnasium banners.
CRUEL RITES OF MANHOOD
APPLIQUED NYLON BANNER, 3' x 4.5', 2015
The series This Is Pro Football appropriates hyperbolic catchprhases and poetic slogans summarizing the sport from the "voice-of-god" narrations of NFL Films for a series of amateur gymnasium banners.
SPORTSNATION
INSTALLATION VIEW, 2015
Solo gallery exhibition, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
FORMATIONS
HD VIDEO, 5 MINUTES, 2016
"The exemplary spectator has his occasional lusts, but not for warfare, hardly at all for that. No, it's details he needs – impressions, colors, statistics, patterns, mysteries, numbers, idioms, symbols. Football, more than other sports, fulfills this need. It is the one sport guided by language, by the word signal, the snap number, the color code, the play name..." (Don DeLillo, END ZONE)
GHOSTS OF EMPIRE (Sketch)
16MM FILM / DIGITAL VIDEO, IN-PROGRESS
Part film-essay, part critical elegy, Ghosts of Empire examines the history of representation of football in American cinema, football’s concussion crisis, the twilight of emulsion-based film manufacturing, and the legacy of the company NFL Films, once Kodak’s biggest customer. Working with source footage from the 1967 NFL Films “ur-text,” They Call It Pro Football, this excerpt was initiated at the Independent Imaging Retreat in Mount Forest, Ontario, summer 2015.
