Magnificent Obsessions is an assembled collage, with footage and sounds drawn from a variety of seemingly unrelated sources: memories stored on YouTube profiles and cell phone cameras, clips from classic melodramas and sitcoms, and so forth.
All the video material is traced / rotoscoped / processed / filtered / distorted manually with charcoal and India ink. The accumulated markings from the processing will simultaneously distort and repurpose the scenes into new narratives while embracing the conflict between sequences.
The title of my project comes from Douglas Sirk’s 1954 masterpiece, “Magnificent Obsession.” Taking inspiration from Sirk’s film, the project explores tropes of false identity, blindness, and desire within the context of a lurid Hollywood melodrama.

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