PORTFOLIO 2025

1. BLACKOUT, 2025

BLACKOUT, 2025

Single channel video with sound,  41min total run time

BLACKOUT is a mid length experimental documentary that explores my father’s gaps in memory, military redactions, and the entertainment industry’s treatment of PTSD. With the military themed TV show JAG as its starting point, this work examines how the film and television industry and the US military work together to fill in narrative gaps. BLACKOUT is organized around interviews with five professionals at intersections between Hollywood production and the military, including my father, who has PTSD and was an actor on JAG for almost a decade.  The experimental documentary threads together conversations between my father, a script supervisor for the Army, a combat videographer, an Iraqi role player employed in US military training, and a writer for a TV show partially funded by the US military. The film walks the blurry line between fact and fiction in both content and form to explore ways that representation and lived reality shape each other through what’s not being said. I’ve screened this work as both a single channel film as well as a four channel installation, in which I used set flats made by a company that fabricates both military training environments and television sets. BLACKOUT was most recently presented in a solo exhibition at REDCAT. It has received support from Field of Vision, Foundation for Contemporary Art, and has been reviewed in Frieze. 

Excerpt below: 1:06 min https://vimeo.com/993220846

Excerpt below: 4:58 min https://vimeo.com/1070861916?share=copy

2. Nightvision, 2025

Nightvision #1 (CIA & JAG), 2025

Inkjet print, document obtained through FOIA request, 20” x 26”

Nightvision is a series of five works that utilize green screen, black outs, and night vision to reflect upon technologies of seeing beyond what the eye can perceive. This series of works on paper overlay night vision scenes from mainstream films and television episodes with heavily redacted documents from the entertainment industries’ coordination with defense agencies. Text range from 1960s documents of CIA conversations with James Bond films, to 2012 conversations between the CIA and Zero Dark Thirty directors and writers. At REDCAT the lights in the exhibition were programmed to shut off when there were blackouts in the film, so these framed works had moments of being darkness within the exhibition run.

3. OCPA Weekly Reports, 2025

OCPA Weekly Report, 2025

Paper, ink, 11" x 8.5” x variable height

OCPA Weekly Reports (2025), is a growing stack of documents that I added to throughout the exhibition, comprised of weekly reports I obtained through Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests from the Offices of Public Affairs for the US Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force between 2010 and the present. 

4. Without Whose Cooperation, 2025

Without Whose Cooperation, 2025

Single Channel Video with sound, 60 min

Without Whose Cooperation is a feature length compilation of scrolling credits of over 300 major Hollywood productions from 1939 to 2025 that credit military branches and personnel for contributions to the film. Each branch of the military has a public affairs office that provides support in the form of military equipment, soldiers, and consulting in exchange for the ability to change the script. Each segment of rolling credits has a different soundtrack, suddenly changing songs as the next set of credits come on, nodding towards the wide range of films that are supported and with each dramatic shift in affect. This video was installed on a monitor on the back of the set flat that BLACKOUT was projected on.

Excerpt Below: 1:19 https://vimeo.com/1070159159?share=copy

5. Quiet Set - Dorothy Arzner, 2025 (work in progress)

Quiet Set - Dorothy Arzner, 2025 (work in progress)

Quiet Set is a work in progress that will consist of four films, each focusing on a queer filmmaker from the 1920s-30s during the transition from silent to sound film. I use sound to engage the epistemologies of the closet that have both muted and changed the legacies of each of these filmmakers. I listen to what could not be said at the time, and work with the holes in queer film history to think through ways experimental nonfiction can sound the depths of those silences. I’m currently working on the first video Quiet Set: Dorothy Arzner. As Arzner was directing Paramount’s first talkie she became frustrated with the stationary mics, so she asked a prop person to attach a mic to a fishing rod, inventing the boom pole. My video takes her invention as a starting point for embodied sonic research, using my own recreation of her original design as a recording device in my exploration of her home and archive. I’ve screened this work-in-progress at UnionDocs and Rutgers University, and received support from NYSCA and a CalArts Research Fellowship.

6. Out of Play, 2020

Out of Play, 2020

Video Installation at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, four channel video installation, each video approx. 10 min

Set walls approx. 12ft x 12ft each, parabolic speaker, projection

Out of Play is a four part video installation that explored themes similar to BLACKOUT, but in a multi channel spatialized installation. The set walls that comprised the screening areas were used and donated from a set fabrication company that makes sets for both military training sites and film and television sets. The video excerpt below shows both the set fabrication, military training site they were used at, and an interview with an Iraqi role player who worked at the military training site.

Excerpt Below: 2:45 min https://vimeo.com/532098293?share=copy

7. Sound Off (curatorial project) 2020

Sound Off: Silence + Resistance, 2020

https://welcometolace.org/lace/upcoming-emerging-curator-2020-abigail-raphael-collins-sound-off/

SOUND OFF: Silence + Resistance is a curatorial project that takes up silence as a tool for political resistance. The work by each artist and activist in the exhibition engages silence as a way to honor the inarticulable, defy demands of production, prioritize deep listening, and refuse to incriminate. Rather than negate the importance of speaking up, speaking truth to power, or raising our voices, this exhibition treats silence as a powerful tool of resistance alongside speech.

Artists: Pauline Boudry + Renate Lorenz, Nikita Gale, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Sharon Hayes, Baseera Khan, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Aliza Shvarts

8. OverSight, 2015

OverSight, 2015

Single channel video installation with sound, total run time 13 min 

OverSight explores ways that drones in Gaza have an auditory impact, one that reaches beyond what our eyes can see. Interviewing a pregnant translator living in Gaza, a sound engineer, a drone operator, and an ultrasound specialist, this video focuses on the sonic impact that moves through bodies and through generations

Excerpt Below: 3:03 https://vimeo.com/344224354?share=copy#t=0

Excerpt Below: 3:00 https://vimeo.com/344224515?share=copy#t=0