Very loosely inspired by Les Blank's documentary Burden of Dreams, which chronicles the myriad adversities faced during the making of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, Adult Movie (2011), my most recent video, explores the internal conflicts and struggles of art making, money making and adulthood. Marrying a non-linear, diaristic narrative and a fragmented movie-within-a-movie melodrama, this new work, which I developed over the course of the past three years, reflects upon my desire to move forward artistically, a recent residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and my brief career as a dancer at a lesbian strip club.

The title Adult Movie is a misleading double entendre, intended to titillate with promises of pornography but quickly giving way instead to meditations on the quest for financial independence, and greater self-confidence. Drawing from the "Herzog-ian" ideal of the heroic male artist and the harsh jungle encampment where Fitzcarraldo was filmed, I transpose the narrative themes of perseverance and conquest to my own internal landscape. Stripping becomes a metaphor for a sensibility of emotional nakedness and vulnerability. The same impulses that attracted me to stripping are also what drew me to become an artist -- the desire to reveal myself and to be seen.