For my 6th Street Studios and Art Center residency, I propose a series of video portraits of the Gilroy community.

The Gilroy video portraits continue my ongoing exploration of an old artistic tradition in a young medium. Traditional studio portraits present a moment fixed in paint or photochemical; electronic moving images offer a slice of time. I am fascinated by this potential. What can a moving portrait reveal about its subject? Using video, can we engage the sitter as co-creator with the artist? Can filters function as masks or costuming, obscuring and revealing the subject much as makeup or fashion shapes a presence?

I began making video portraits about the same time the word "selfie" came into common use. I was originally inspired by Warhol's film portraits as seen in Chelsea Girls. I thought it would be fun to use video projections to light my sitters, expanding the live lighting tricks that Andy Warhol employed. In lieu of gels and gobos manipulated by hand, I used my VJ tools to paint my subjects with light. In late 2012, I tested this idea with an intern; in early 2013 I explored this further with friends on my birthday. That evening, I could not find an adapter to capture the sessions in my computer so I recorded them on VHS.

These sessions were joyful for me and my friends, so I proposed the project for a mini-residency at Eyebeam in Manhattan. The VHS Portraits were shot on unique VHS tapes; the exhibition presented viewers with a growing stack of tapes that they would play on 3 large flat screens. Five dozen portraits were completed during the residency.

This residency led to a commission from Deutsche Bank to create a self-portraiture installation for Frieze Art Fair. Picturing You premiered in 2014 as a two-person interactive artwork in which two guests would portray each other using custom software and iPads.

Picturing You was then reworked as a single channel artwork and was exhibited at Everson Museum, Bandung International Digital Arts Festival, NACC in Bangkok and many other showings.

For my 6th Street Studios residency, I'd like to expand the video portraiture series with new tools I've assembled during pandemic lockdown. I have built up a collection of analog image processing modules for flexible manipulation of video—without a computer. These modules allow for patch-programmable video synthesis. I would like to invite members of the 6th Street community to come sit for portraiture sessions, and to learn about the tools I use to make video portraits.

I would like to schedule portrait sessions, workshops and showings of the portraits as would be convenient for 6th Street Studios and Art Center

I've attached images from Picturing You. Here's a compilation taken from various exhibitions: https://youtu.be/4VOwOvdWWc4