An artist statement in three parts
It All Started with a Seagull
It all started with a seagull.
Part I: It All Started with a Seagull
Everyone remembers the first time they had their first camera. Maybe it was handed down from a parent, worn leather and the faint smell of old film. Maybe it was a small point-and-shoot bought with months of saved allowance. However it arrived, there's almost always a moment. A before and an after.
My parents used to tell me something I didn't fully understand as a child: that people move through their days looking down. Shoulders curved, eyes on the pavement, phones buzzing in pockets. Life presses in close, and the sky gets forgotten. But they said that when sorrow finally arrives, when something hollow opens up inside you, that's when you look up. As if the sky were always waiting.
I was a competitive swimmer, a BC regional representative, and for a while the water was everything. Then an injury took it away. Not all at once, but the way things tend to disappear: slowly, then completely. I found myself adrift in a life I no longer recognized, and I did what my parents had always described. I looked up.
I watched that bird for two hours a day. I'm aware of how that sounds. But something had shifted. For the first time since the injury, I wanted to hold onto a moment rather than escape one. I wanted to keep what I was seeing.
That want, that quiet and specific desire to preserve something, is why I picked up a camera.
When I eventually returned to the water, the seagull came with me. Not literally, but as a feeling, a posture toward life. The idea that surrender and strength are not opposites. That you can let the current carry you and still be exactly where you mean to be. It's why I have a seagull tattooed over my heart. Some things earn their place there.
— continued
For hours, sometimes. Just sky. I watched clouds move with a passiveness that mirrored my own, drifting without intention, going wherever the air decided. It felt uncomfortably familiar.
And then I saw a seagull.
I had never really looked at a bird before, not closely, not with any real attention. Birds had always been background noise. But this one stopped me. I had always taken flight for granted as a symbol of freedom, but watching smaller birds, the sparrows, the pigeons, the ones that beat their wings just to stay airborne, it struck me that they weren't so different from us. Moving because they had to. Getting from one place to the next. It looked less like freedom and more like commuting.
But the seagull glided. It held its wings open and let the wind do the work, surrendering to the current rather than fighting it. There was no performance in it, no urgency. Just trust. I kept watching, and after a while the only word that came to me was freedom. Not as an idea, but as a living thing. Something I could see.
FIRST THINGS I EVER STOPPED TO LOOK AT
Los Angeles (2017)
Los Angeles (2017)
Los Angeles (2017)
San Diego (2017)
San Diego (2017)
San Diego (2017)
Vancouver (2017)
San Diego (2017)
San Diego (2017)
San Diego (2017)
20 DOLLARS & A QUESTION
I did not go to film school. I studied Kinesiology at the University of Toronto, the science of human movement, how bodies work, how they adapt, how they push past their own limits. It was a good fit for a former competitive swimmer. Logical, even. But through every semester, I kept finding my way back to a camera.
Part-time jobs, side projects, anything that put a lens in my hand. I couldn't explain it clearly at the time. It wasn't ambition so much as pull. The same way you keep returning to a song you don't fully understand yet.
When I finally decided to take it seriously, I realized I had a question I needed to answer: what do I actually want to film? Not what looks good on a reel. Not what pays well. What makes me feel something real when I'm behind the camera?
So I ran an experiment. I charged twenty dollars and said to everything.
YES
The $20 Era
Tattoo Artist : DN
Tattoo Artist: Hyunju
Music All Around: Orchestra
aubove commercial
Aubove commercial II
Buldogs
BULDOGS II
Bridal Hair Artist: GIL
toroast cafe
Hana sushi (edit only)
I remember people trying to talk me out of it. They warned me that the rate you charge becomes the value you carry, that starting at twenty dollars was a ceiling I'd never break through. That I'd be nothing more than a twenty-dollar videographer, and the market would remember.
But I had a question that mattered more to me than the market. Was I doing this for the money, or did I actually love it? And if someone handed me twenty dollars and trusted me with their story, could I give them back something worth ten times that? I needed to know.
A coffee shop. An orchestra. A hot dog truck parked outside a stadium at midnight. I showed up to all of it, camera in hand, genuinely curious. Some days were humbling. Some were quietly beautiful. But I was paying attention, tracking my own responses the way a scientist might, looking for the variable that changed everything.
I found it in a pair of eyes.
Not staged, not performed. The eyes of someone who had forgotten the camera was there. Someone mid-thought, mid-feeling, fully inside whatever they were doing. I believe there is a specific quality to a person's gaze when they are completely absorbed in their craft, a kind of aliveness that sits just behind the iris. When I caught it in the viewfinder for the first time, something in me went still.
That became the thread. I started seeking out people who carried their profession in their body: dancers, tattoo artists, hairdressers. People who had spent years learning to do one thing with total devotion. When I filmed them at work, I wasn't just documenting a skill. I was watching someone be entirely themselves. Undiluted.
In those moments, I admired them in the truest sense of the word. Not envy, not comparison. Something closer to wonder. The dancer who moves like the music lives inside Him. The tattooist whose hand barely seems to think. The hairdresser who reads a person's face before she reads the brief. Each of them free in a way that was entirely their own.
And here is what I didn't expect: that in the act of finding their freedom, I kept finding mine. The seagull taught me what it looked like. These people taught me it could be found anywhere, in anyone, in the particular and unrepeatable way each person inhabits their own life. My job, as I've come to understand it, is simply to be present enough to catch it.
— continued
Part III: What I Bring to Frame
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I did not go to film school. I want to say that again, not as an apology, but as a fact I've made peace with and eventually come to value.
What I have instead is a degree in Kinesiology, years of competitive sport, and a career built from the ground up on twenty-dollar jobs and genuine curiosity. No one handed me a visual language. I had to find it myself, which means every choice I make behind the camera has been earned, tested, and chosen on purpose.
Studying human movement taught me to see bodies before I speak to them. I notice how a person holds tension in their shoulders, how their eyes change when they're thinking versus when they're feeling, how confidence looks different from person to person and is almost always more interesting than they think. Most people don't see themselves clearly. That's where I come in.
My work is not about making people look good. It's about making them look true. There's a version of you that exists when you're completely in your element, absorbed in what you do, unselfconscious, alive. It's brief, it's unguarded, and it is the most compelling thing a camera can find. I've built my entire practice around being ready for that moment.
Freedom, I've learned, is not a feeling people perform. It's something that slips out when they forget to hold it back.
Every choice I make, the way I frame a shot, how I pace a cut, the temperature of a color, is in service of one thing: the person in front of my lens. Not their best angle. Not what they think they should look like.. Them. The version of themselves they rarely get to see, the one that surfaces when they're fully inside what they love.
That's what I'm here to capture. I would like to find it with you, put it on screen, and make sure no one who watches it forgets how it felt.
