Butter and Rice

“Butter and Rice” is a video project consisting of mobile phone videos taken between January and October of 2020. This project was informed by the COVID-19 pandemic and concurrent 2020 California wildfires. Rather than making these overarching events the subject, the footage instead highlights the things on which one begins to focus when daily life slows down: repetitive movements of water, the changing of the leaves, bees pollinating flowers at the hardware store. These seemingly banal subjects are each shown through peepholes cut out of fields of color, the hue of which emphasizes either an element of the subject or of the scene as a whole.

Limiting the footage to these dimensions also opened up ways to expand on the role these frames play in the project, prompting questions like:

Is the square a frame the audience looks through or is it an object itself?

When is the frame a frame and when is it an active participant in the narrative?