Artist Statement
My work deals with representations of female subjectivity, mother-daughter relationships, and class. This subject matter reflects my Native-American and white working-class background. One of the dirty secrets in America today is the lack of discussion of class difference. Working class culture has yet to receive fair treatment--either because we have no language with which to describe it, or because there is no empowered community to voice it. Because this is the world from which I come, I feel that it is my gift and responsibility to articulate the truths that I know, such as losing a mother at sixteen to an accidental gunshot caused by one of my brothers. I use this life experience as a way to channel larger narratives that shows how values are continuously being eroded by socio-economic forces.
Making films is a way of describing my experience growing up in a working-class family with many of the same issues of violence and sexism described in my film AKA KATHE. I did not see the lives of the people I grew up with reflected in the mainstream media. My work is an attempt to tell these stories in a way that addresses the problems of class, gender and race while respecting the difficult and dignified lives of the people in my films-- and in my family. I want to tell these stories in a way that is accessible but resists the stereotypes of the working poor, Native Americans and women through innovative formal structure-
I make sure my films allow my subjects to speak in their own voice-they speak directly into the camera, place my own history in relation to that of my subjects and allow the viewer to identify with my subjects as whole people: sisters, mothers and friends as well as the more difficult categories of prostitute, addict, bad mother, etc. I use formal methods in combination with life experience to produce documentaries and narratives, which tell stories from my life and the lives of many women whose voices often unheard.
My documentaries use a reflexive form of filmmaking to introduce the experience of class to a mainstream audience. I have people look into the camera and use my voice to comment on the production process. I do this to acknowledge my own specificity and to encourage the viewer to do the same. In the scene when I interview Kathe's son for the first time, the order of subject/object in the documentary form is reversed. My camera gaze alternates between the Other and the Self, between the act of filming and being filmed. This is elaborated in DO YOU KNOW... using a playful soundtrack that not only avoids literal connection with the visuals, but also alters the meaning of the images. Without the soundtrack, DO YOU KNOW... would be another travelogue memoir. Instead, it becomes a visual landscape about displacement and economic hardship and loss.