Why We Walk is a film about the power of walking.

I acted as a one man animation team for Why We Walk, bridging the backstories of the film’s heroes with American and Ethiopian history through extensive animated sequences.

I was recently awarded with an Individual Excellence Award/ grant from the Ohio Arts Council for my animation work on the film.

Why We Walk has showed at 25 film festivals in 2022 including - Lyons International Film Festival - Dallas African American Film Festival - Richmond International Film Festival - Winterland Film Festival- Something Wicked Docu Festival - Northeast Pennsylvania Film Festival - Northern Virginia Film Festival - Bare Bones Film and Music Festival

Abdi, one of the films heroes, escaped the Ethiopian Civil War of 1977 on foot as a child.

This Prologue was made possible with support from the Adobe Creative Residency Fund.

Why We Walk will have an official premiere this summer, follow along with updates at @dothatwalsh

"14 Days of Drawing" is a book of wonky observational drawings from all over Cincinnati. The drawings all have people in them, usually talking to each other. For me it was a reason to carve out a few hours a day, every day, to draw. 
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The book is also a beautiful, multi-folded, screen printed situation, thanks to @cryptogramink And his paper/color/layout mastery. There is also a poster in it!

@cryptogramink and I are Take a Moment Studio.

Take a Moment is a collaborative studio with no set home. Jon does a layer of screen printing, but with hand cut stencils for every print, then I do a layer of drawing with paint pens and markers. We make posters that are more like drawings, collaborations what are done quickly during day long sessions. Over the course of a session we’ll make 15-30 unique pieces. We react to the room and gladly accept a wide range of venues.

Take a Moment had a four month residency at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH where twice a week we would make work reacting to our conversations and questions from our audience, aka whoever happened to be there that afternoon. Lots of teenagers, lots of people from out of town on a business trip. We made unknowable hundreds of posters during our time there.

Take a moment is an ongoing collaboration with many arms.

Select Prints and T-Shirts are available for purchase here.

Infinite Jest is without a doubt my favorite book, I’ve read it twice in two years, so this is unbelievable to say the least. David Foster Wallace changed my life and helped put words to the hardest to define parts of my worldview. I started with This is Water and went from there. He really nailed something about modern American life and loneliness, I’m so glad he put out as much work as he did in his time with us.

I went all over the place during the process of making this cover. The book is full of iconic imagery, trash flying through the air, a radically altered map of North America, addiction, various hats, crazy homemade lenses, film lights, wheelchairs, gobs of multilayered mold, and tennis, lots of tennis. 

I played around with all of that, and created many “final” covers before deciding on my final image. Many of them were compelling images, but didn’t translate into a striking book cover. I decided that for me, the most central theme in the book had to do with what we are looking for when we look towards entertainment. What is it about entertainment that draws us in, even though we know on some level that most of it is created by people who really only care about your money.  

These images are a look into my process for the final cover.

I started with cameras, The descriptions throughout of James Incandenza's custom made lenses always stood out to me. I wanted to visualize the multi-lens bolex cameras Mario is always hauling around.

I also played with tennis imagery, especially Images that tie tennis and addiction. This image is a reference to the ETA kids idly squeezing their tennis balls. I wanted to make the squeeze look tense and desperate.

The intense sock tan caused by constant outdoor tennis struck me as another tennis/addiction crossover image. 

I did a photoshoot attempting to capture the facial expression and sunk in look of someone watching "The Entertainment".

Which led me to

Which led me to my final submission. 

Once I was informed that I had won, I went through a round of revisions with the clients at Little, Brown and Company, and The David Foster Wallace Estate. There were concerns about Illustrated text and the overall darkness of the design. We worked together to come to the final design. 

The final design is much brighter and more etherial than the original. In this version the screen feels more universal, less a literal TV sitting in a dark room, more like a deity.

I am very honored to have been chosen for this contest and to have touched David Foster Wallace's work in any way, let alone such a public one. 

'Who Has The Time?' is a video series combining interviews of people who meditate with hand painted animations.

I reached out to the public through a simple poster with a painting of a meditating groundhog and the question, do you meditate? At the bottom of the poster there was a strip of tear-off contact sheets for people to contact me. 

Through this process I met and interviewed seven local meditators ranging in life experience from waitresses to doctors and artists, united only by their connection to meditation.

In the interviews, we talked about their paths to meditation and how it's presence informs their lives. I gained a lot of precious life experience, and perspective from these conversations and I hope some of that shows through in the work. 

These videos were done as the main component of my capstone project at DAAP.