40 days of art
31
Sad
Sad was an album I made about things that normally people would say, “aww thats so sad!” I made some fun designs for this one. I came up with the idea to make bingo cards with sad animals on the front, where fans could play video bingo with me for fun prizes!
By this point, I had been freelancing for a long time and I knew about the working for exposure trap. I wrote Exposure Kills as an anthem for artists who are sick of being asked to do labor for free (I really try my best to always pay my crew something even if it comes from my own pockets). I wanted to make a music video on a tiny budget, so I had to write the concept with that restriction in mind. I was on a studio rental website (I had exhausted every corner of my apartment and I needed to make a video somewhere else) and did a search for space rentals from lowest price to highest. The cheapest place I found was this photo studio that was all white, and I had the idea to create this surrealist world where everything was white and bland. Since everything was super stripped down, I also wanted to put black labels on everything, so the concept of what it was was clear, but still very white and empty like the capitalist trap we all exist in.
I asked my friend Shelton to co-direct and co-design it with me. We found a bunch of objects at the dollar store and painted them all white. Then, I cut out a bunch of letters by hand out of black contact paper and attached them to everything (even balloons), so all the objects were kind of an empty shell representation of what they actually were. I hired two actors (Filipe and Sam) that I had met from improv to be in the video with me. Rob Menzer who I met via Two Minutes to Late Night shot it.
The second video for the album was for left Swipe Left, which is all about the horrors of online dating. I love a good spectacle, so I made a giant Tinder window and walked around Brooklyn interacting with strangers asking them to date me. Max Shade shot it and since this was super guérilla style with no home base, I had Erin Ryan on second camera and Jessica helping me with other details (she made a cameo at the end!)
I wanted people to watch it, so I had a funny idea on how to promote this video in a cheap way. I put up a bunch of tear sheet flyers around New York that showed a picture of me crying on the beach in my Tinder window and wrote DATE ME! In all caps. When people took off a tab they were directed to the video. My friend Elissa connected me with Holly, who helped me slap up a bunch of flyers around Brooklyn. Not sure if it got me too many more views, but I did create quite the spectacle.
