My Ghost Dance, Scavenged and Bartered is a sculptural video installation. The piece is comprised of a 10’ x 5’ tapestry hand woven found theatrical 35mm motion picture film. This weaving becomes the fabric for a tipi structure. Inside the film tipi is a video projector on a low stand, made by collaborator Conor Fields, that rotates 360 degrees once a minute. The video projector plays a digital transfer of 16mm film shot on a handmade motion picture pinhole camera. The audio in the piece is the sound of the 16mm projector, original Ghost Dance songs recorded by James Mooney in 1894 and my own  voice struggling to introduce myself in Ojibwa, my tribe’s traditional language. These elements create a paracinematic event – light shining through film onto a white wall – abstracted by the distance of the film from the light source, and the fact that the film is woven together into a still object and it is the light that moves instead. The images created in the darkened space become ghosts dancing across the walls, patterns of color and shadows of weaving.

Installed at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, February 2012