Lymelight2026

A little Marie Menken, a little Ornette Coleman.

Shot on Super 8mm film in East Lyme, Connecticut, in the summer of 2025.

Artist Statement:

As a little kid, I hated fireworks. Everything about them — the noise, the sudden brightness, the unpredictability — terrified me. I even recall my parents giving me earplugs one summer while our family partook in Fourth of July festivities to stop me from crying. As I grew older, my political consciousness developed and the militaristic connotation of fireworks made me resent them even more. That, coupled with the terror and confusion they engender in many animals and the light pollution they cause still makes me wonder: how can someone enjoy something so assaultive?

Every year, during the last weekend of July in East Lyme, Connecticut (the town adjacent to the one I grew up in), all of Main Street is blocked off for “East Lyme Appreciation Day.” This celebration consists of a number of street vendors, live musicians, carnival rides, and fireworks. Despite my dislike of fireworks, East Lyme Appreciation Day was a highlight of many childhood summers. Having not attended one since moving to New York City, I decided to accompany a few friends in the summer of 2025 to see if I still felt a sense of nostalgia or magic. I didn’t — the experience proved strangely underwhelming — and I struggled with this unresolved feeling throughout the day while carrying around my Super8 camera. At sundown, I joined my friends on the boardwalk and decided to film the fireworks display in short, stochastic bursts.

The act of filming (and therefore my attention to focus, framing, and the amount of footage I was using) proved a welcome distraction. I sat on the footage for about a year, unsure of what to do with it. Then, I was reminded of two experimental shorts I had recently seen: one by Warren Sonbert (1991's Short Fuse), the other by Pablo Eguía (from the series Historia Natural, 2024-25). Both contained footage of fireworks and artificial light that was mesmerizing. I also recalled Marie Menken’s Lights (1966), one of my favorite experimental films, wherein the filmmaker abstracts a plethora of department store lights at Christmastime with her handheld 16mm camera. And naturally, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) — which features stunning homoerotic footage of a Roman candle shooting sparks, among other visuals — was top of mind. I realized that fireworks were the fodder of many avant-garde filmmakers for an obvious reason. They are the embodiment of cinema in its most elemental form: light and motion.

As with the films of Menken, Anger, Sonbert, Eguía, and countless others, could my filmic apparatus in some way defang something I so feared and reviled? Transmute violence and artificiality into a kind of lush hypnosis? I didn’t want to make the fireworks appear sensual or romantic, but might re-presenting and disrupting their frenetic intensity — coupled with the garish neon patterns of the carnival lights — metamorphose their havoc into something subversive and even sumptuous? Neutralization by way of abstraction? Trading bellicose aggression for psychedelic flamboyance, machine-gun staccato for the spontaneous, improvisational flow of free jazz?

Lymelight is my attempt to answer these questions, and to reconcile my ambivalent feelings about fireworks on film versus fireworks in real life.