Drawing on the practices of autoethnography, experimental video, and contemporary landscape photography, Paradise is a dark travelogue that focuses on the sites of five American tragedies. These sites are largely un-sanctified and generally not prioritized in national memory, though in some cases they have been briefly sensationalized. The viewer experiences each place and its history through current and archival images, local sound, and a meticulously researched but poetic retelling of the events by the artist-narrator.

The basic tenet of cultural geography infuses the work: that we can read the treatment of any landscape for clues about the culture that occupies it. Absence can be telling. In each of the five chapters in Paradise, the vistas are stark and what is not visible becomes as important as what is visible. Details are obscure and names often go unnamed. We cannot always be sure what specific event is being recalled. This allows viewers who are familiar with each particular history to experience those events in a new way, and viewers who are unfamiliar with them to find a way in as pure narrative.

Images of seemingly benign countryside are interspersed or overlaid with a cloud of sparkling lights. This cloud signifies the ineffable forces at work in each story – the protective force of community, the survival instinct, or a place holder for what has been lost and is not so easily defined. The lights are meant to suggest that divinity may be something more earthbound than heavenly. That they stand in for things that have often gone un-memorialized amounts to a quiet indictment of - and lament for - America.