cibachrome photographs
multi-channel video installation
2000

Becoming series explores the act of constructing and playing a character (through pose and gesture) in an attempt to define one’s self.  For it, I chose the seminal films viewed in my past, literally projected scenes and stood in for different characters.  These scenes represent a collection of images and sounds through which I learned to define and interpret myself.  Imitating and taking on characters’ physical and psychological attributes created a tangible hybrid, both audience and performer, adoring fan and movie star.  Enacting certain scenes exposed the gestures implemented in projecting my own image.  Once identified, these gestures were manipulated.  I could change my self, become another man, a woman, a psychotic, a victim, a monster.  Psychological states, gender, and sexual orientation could be altered by simply changing the movie. Becoming represents an effort to employ a more malleable form of self.

In To Cruise, I align myself with the Al Pacino's character in the movie Cruising as he struggles to find his identity, first as a police officer, then as an undercover cop and, ultimately as a possibly closeted murderer (PC it ain't...). The images would be presented in a horizontal line based on the chronology of the film.