I Have To Close My Eyes, HD Video 2015: Shown at Indie Grits Film Festival, South Carolina, Athens International Film Festival Ohio, Experiments in Cinema, New Mexico. The dislocation between memory and documentation, the slippage between fact and fiction in family lore. Sometimes, personal lore fashions a more alluring and seamless story than the actual one- both in love and family.

I Have To Close My Eyes, HD Video 2015: I grew up on this story: 150 years ago, my great grandfather and his brother fled Germany because of intellectual persecution. Dr.Herman Burmeister, landed in South America where he gave the scientific name “Burmeister” to every animal in sight- porpoises, birds, frogs, and beetles (those featured in the work). These animals are now endangered or extinct, but have been preserved and shared via online documentation allowing me to see them for the first time Through recent digital archiving, I have been able to access his manuscripts, collection, and historical records once unknown to my family and discovered that family lore had edited and reshaped the truth. Online historians suggest that Dr. Herman Burmeister had an ongoing charged theoretical argument with Charles Darwin, and that perhaps his exodus from Germany had more to do with his difficult personality than with the intellectual climate. The juxtaposition between memory and documentation creates a tension, which I married to fragments of a poem written in the aftermath of a love affair. Sometimes, personal lore fashions a more alluring and seamless story than the actual one- both in love and family.