I am driven to render life into narratives as intrinsically edifying. It allows me to foreground how arbitrary cognitive organization can be in shaping perception. I explore a variety of vehicles to register the different stories. As a screenwriter (Casa Grande ’14, Pears ’16, Volatile ‘ 02, Chipped ’03), I have always sought to flesh out the idiosyncrasies that make us human, and to make use of temporal ellipsis to detract and question causal relationships. My video-art work harks on the desire to frame images and foster an artificially ingenuous relationship with sound, to resist the notion that a work of art suspends reality, instead reminding its viewers that this is a crafted, deliberate work, put together by one singular subjective vision. Even when I am not writing in the first person, I remain rooted in the awareness of how my own distortions punctuate my register with my own settled interests.

For every memorable female nude, there are negative hundreds of male nudes. Drawing from John Berger’s WAYS OF SEEING notion that the naked and the nudes differ from each other in their inclusion or exclusion of the beholder of the gaze, Oggle will amass a collection of male nude photographs that attempts to be an antidote to the tropes of pornography that women have to thoroughly been subject to. I will set out to photograph Canadian men in the nude in mundane everyday actions that already comprise their existence. The point is to de-erotify the body, and allow women to gaze at the opposite sex with an architectural, aesthetic interest and to distance nakedness from the mercantile rewards of images produced to sell sexuality as instrinsic to the physical body. Instead of a mere phallic reversal of the same dynamics of dominance, in competing, for whom gets to frame the subject and in what terms, I am proposing a feminine stance to produce images that state” no, my power is not infinite, yet I refuse to let that rob me of my joie-de-vivre.”

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Karen Sztajnberg is a Brazilian filmmaker, writer, video-artist, and educator. She straddles many mediums pursuing her relentless fascination with how stories get doled out with text and images. Sztainberg holds her BA from Bard College and MFA from Columbia University. She is a Professor of Narrative Film Editing at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.