location: Pittsburgh Downtown and Southside
date: 2001

Certain images are repeated so often in the media they are emptied of meaning. Others play once and disappear from public view. Plagued by feelings of dÈjý vu, I strapped a small camera to my wrist to distribute the images of past events whose echoes I was hearing in contemporary media. The sequences were distributed frame by frame in public places and reconstructed to produce documentation of the event.

#1: Clear the Halls
A sequence of police breaking up a demonstration against a House Unamerican Activities Committee hearing was dropped in public buildings as the Pittsburgh City Council debated whether the city would enforce the Patriot Act.

#2: Ladies and Gentlemen
A number of former mill sites have been redeveloped and named for the furnace that once occupied the site. Furnaces were almost exclusively named after women ñ leaving the area scattered with the first names of the wives and daughters of steel magnates. The christening ceremony of a steel furnace was handed out to passersby on the site of the Southside Works ñ once a steel mill, now redeveloped into a high-end shopping center.