The Magic Box

The Magic Box was made with the collaboration of myself and Gabe Wolff called Foxy-Wolff, and was made for my thesis project for my MFA. The project took three years to produce and was complete in 2016.

Growing from our love of toys, especially the elaborate play sets of the 1980’s, Gabe and I “played out” our vision of the world through the characters we’ve created and grown through this project. Beginning as an exploration of sexuality and gender roles with the first part of the video (which also goes by the name The Magic Box) and evolving to ask questions of the origins of religious belief and selflessness in relationships in The Black Church, this project encompasses many of our interests both as artists and in our personal lives.

Rather than being firm in a statement or purpose for ourselves within the work, our preference is for the viewer to take themselves into the project and build what houses of meaning they find. That has become our highest aspiration for the work, that it facilitate an engagement with the viewer that involves their own lives and passions, that allows each viewer to play with the ideas for themselves.

Because the project took so long to complete, the viewer will see an evolution of not only the ideas we present but the filming style, the musical composition and script writing.  Things that were so very important may have ceased to do so by the completion of the project and techniques we hadn’t tried may have become central to the project by the end. In all the piece does exactly what any collaborative work should do, it has become larger that Gabe or I and more than the two of us combined. 

See the videos for the project here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhIwGj6FmmU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJmgjTZ1y5c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfYtnbEI1zk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us8s-zDyBMk

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