Me loving you/You loving me, 2022. 16mm film transferred to HD video, 9 minutes.
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“Me loving you/You loving me” (2022) is an experimental 16mm film made in tribute to my mother. A tattoo adapted from her handwriting grounds the film’s nonlinear narrative and conjures soundscapes and memories of familial connection. At once an act of memorialization and playful rebellion, the tattoo and its placement are my response to a common quip of hers—“If you ever come home with one of those things, it better be on your butt, and it better say, ‘MOM’.”
The film navigates the space between the tangible and the ephemeral, combining archival material, intimate close-ups of the tattoo process, and a montage of moving still lifes of personal mementos and commemorative objects. Slow cinematic observations of light within the family home and views of clouds in the sky are overlaid throughout the sequence. The evolving, textural soundscape—a wall of sound blending field recordings, voicemail messages, spoken word, and a time-stretched sample from “Mama” by the Spice Girls (which inspired the film's title)—deepens the emotional resonance of the visual elements.
The film navigates the space between the tangible and the ephemeral, combining archival material, intimate close-ups of the tattoo process, and a montage of moving still lifes of personal mementos and commemorative objects. Slow cinematic observations of light within the family home and views of clouds in the sky are overlaid throughout the sequence. The evolving, textural soundscape—a wall of sound blending field recordings, voicemail messages, spoken word, and a time-stretched sample from “Mama” by the Spice Girls (which inspired the film's title)—deepens the emotional resonance of the visual elements.
