“The Suburbs”
Premiered at Stephen Street Gallery, 2025. A digital alter-ego wanders through a digital American suburban environment, reflecting on questions of desire, shame and consumerism.
Excerpt:
The house I grew up in was in between two subdivisions, in a suburb between two cities. It wasn’t close enough to either city to be able to get to them on my own. The horse farms and woods were slowly getting razed for more subdivisions and office parks. By the time I was in high school, half of my free time was spent in the woods, and half was spent sitting in cars in vacant, or half-built, commercial areas. there were times when i felt free, like when i was riding my bike down a hill seeing how high I could get my little Trek handlebar speedometer to go, or the ten or so minutes of flying a remote control airplane in a soccer field at dusk, before i crashed it and needed to go to walmart to buy a new one.
I was seven or eight when we moved into our house. In the backyard there was a swamp full of old glass bottles. They came in shapes and colors that looked nothing like any of the containers in stores or on TV. I dug around in the mud to uncover perfect, hazy, dirt-filled perfume bottles and fantasized that they were worth enormous amounts of money. One day I uncovered a big amber bottle, put my nose up to the opening and took a deep whiff. It smelled terrible - something so thick, so ancient, so rotten, that I hurled the bottle down in disgust, broke it, and spent the rest of the day terrified that whatever I smelled was going to slowly kill me. When my dad got home from work that night, I asked him if you could breathe in things that could kill you. He said yes. I was too scared to ask if the nasty bottle was one of those things. I was afraid I would be punished for smelling the bottle in the first place. I would wait it out and see if I woke up the next morning. This is one of my earliest memories of paranoia, and procrastination.
I continued to follow my nose. I looked for things to break up the monotony. There was something exotic about going to the houses of friends whose parents smoked cigarettes inside. My friend Ben had a tiny blonde rat tail and his mom worked in a kiosk at the mall, writing people's names on grains of rice. His family’s small cape house in the subdivision behind ours smelled thickly of cigarettes. At school I would try to smell the smoky air that lingered behind him as he walked by. The smell was always strongest on his winter jackets. Ben was one of my first friends who moved away. At some point, I visited his new house for a birthday party. On the long drive there I gave a thumbs up to a gleaming red Porsche that pulled up next to us on the highway. The young handsome driver just stared at me, then back at the road. Ben’s new house was far away and rural and wild. When we stood in the open fields, we couldn’t see any other houses. I felt like I was in a big itchy vacuum.
In the sixth grade I became close with a boy named Nick who lived in a cul-de-sac cut into the hill above the town park, and below an empty farm. We were inseparable for a few years. I don't remember if that was because our personalities were compatible or if it was because his house had the video games and snacks that mine didn’t, but I remember that one word could send us into uncontrollable laughter, which happened more often before his parents got divorced. Our town’s house of pizza was in the center of a parking lot shared with his dad’s new apartment complex. We would beg to go and eat their chicken tenders. I remember sitting at the house of pizza with Nick and opening the ketchup packets in a way that I thought was special, because my mom showed it to me, and it made them less messy. I felt bad for Nick, thinking that because his family was unhappy, he would maybe never learn tricks like that.
Nick smelled different than me, and his body looked different and was bigger than mine. I think I found him handsome. We would sit on a bench in his room, playing his playstation 2. The bench had a red corduroy covertop. Once, he got up and left the room, and I leaned down to my right and smelled where he was sitting.
“A Nice Place to Stop and Have a Life”
Premiered at The Emily Harvey Foundation, 2025: A dreamlike exploration of a liminal suburban space.
The house I grew up in was in between two subdivisions, in a suburb between two cities. It wasn’t close enough to either city to be able to get to them on my own. The horse farms and woods were slowly getting razed for more subdivisions and office parks. By the time I was in high school, half of my free time was spent in the woods, and half was spent sitting in cars in vacant, or half-built, commercial areas. there were times when i felt free, like when i was riding my bike down a hill seeing how high I could get my little Trek handlebar speedometer to go, or the ten or so minutes of flying a remote control airplane in a soccer field at dusk, before i crashed it and needed to go to walmart to buy a new one.
I was seven or eight when we moved into our house. In the backyard there was a swamp full of old glass bottles. They came in shapes and colors that looked nothing like any of the containers in stores or on TV. I dug around in the mud to uncover perfect, hazy, dirt-filled perfume bottles and fantasized that they were worth enormous amounts of money. One day I uncovered a big amber bottle, put my nose up to the opening and took a deep whiff. It smelled terrible - something so thick, so ancient, so rotten, that I hurled the bottle down in disgust, broke it, and spent the rest of the day terrified that whatever I smelled was going to slowly kill me. When my dad got home from work that night, I asked him if you could breathe in things that could kill you. He said yes. I was too scared to ask if the nasty bottle was one of those things. I was afraid I would be punished for smelling the bottle in the first place. I would wait it out and see if I woke up the next morning. This is one of my earliest memories of paranoia, and procrastination.
I continued to follow my nose. I looked for things to break up the monotony. There was something exotic about going to the houses of friends whose parents smoked cigarettes inside. My friend Ben had a tiny blonde rat tail and his mom worked in a kiosk at the mall, writing people's names on grains of rice. His family’s small cape house in the subdivision behind ours smelled thickly of cigarettes. At school I would try to smell the smoky air that lingered behind him as he walked by. The smell was always strongest on his winter jackets. Ben was one of my first friends who moved away. At some point, I visited his new house for a birthday party. On the long drive there I gave a thumbs up to a gleaming red Porsche that pulled up next to us on the highway. The young handsome driver just stared at me, then back at the road. Ben’s new house was far away and rural and wild. When we stood in the open fields, we couldn’t see any other houses. I felt like I was in a big itchy vacuum.
In the sixth grade I became close with a boy named Nick who lived in a cul-de-sac cut into the hill above the town park, and below an empty farm. We were inseparable for a few years. I don't remember if that was because our personalities were compatible or if it was because his house had the video games and snacks that mine didn’t, but I remember that one word could send us into uncontrollable laughter, which happened more often before his parents got divorced. Our town’s house of pizza was in the center of a parking lot shared with his dad’s new apartment complex. We would beg to go and eat their chicken tenders. I remember sitting at the house of pizza with Nick and opening the ketchup packets in a way that I thought was special, because my mom showed it to me, and it made them less messy. I felt bad for Nick, thinking that because his family was unhappy, he would maybe never learn tricks like that.
Nick smelled different than me, and his body looked different and was bigger than mine. I think I found him handsome. We would sit on a bench in his room, playing his playstation 2. The bench had a red corduroy covertop. Once, he got up and left the room, and I leaned down to my right and smelled where he was sitting.