Hey Esther!
“Although the camera is an observation station, the act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep happening.” - Susan Sontag
“This Performance Art Is for the Birds” - Johnny Knoxville
Statement: "we weren't bored" began when I was sixteen with my krew of friends, a skate video that morphed into a documentation of antics, pranks, and stunts. The parts of the skate videos I always gravitated to the most. Although we weren't proficient skateboarders, we captured the essence of our adventures, creating a vivid time capsule of our lives from age sixteen to twenty-two. We were always shooting for “the video” but were seemingly more interested in making stuff happen instead of sitting down and editing the footage together. I’ve slowly started putting these things together since 2015. I’m still friends with everyone from this krew.
We would organize entire day-long events for ourselves to shoot, like finding water skis and pulling each other down a dirt road, road trips to Las Vegas, scoping spots to do car launches and donuts, throwing parties with the explicit goal of shooting footage, or building different potato guns to shoot at tube televisions and toilets found in the desert and eventually turning those into flame throwers. We also documented simple day-to-day interactions of a young subcultural person, mosh pits and fights at the local punk youth venue "Skrappys," interactions with adults and cops that hate skateboarders, late night graffiti runs, and just shooting the shit, making each other laugh. Over the years, I’ve revisited and compiled this footage, recognizing its foundational role in my journey as an artist.
This work is not without nuance. The complexities of the young male experience of sorting out our relationship to masculinity and society at large are on full display here. This is to say that the work, while jovial and fun, also has elements of self-destructive behavior, substance abuse, and general angst that would lead to a continued pattern most of us would have to figure out how to evolve past and distance ourselves from. The 20+ year gap since we started this project has given many insights into this period, and I am incredibly thankful to still have maintained the friendships I made then and now.
p.s. the dog got adopted by a very wealthy friend and probably ate better than me the rest of it’s life. I’m pretty sure she met Michelle Obama at one point.
below are some studio tests with tube tv’s.
