In 2020, Tomi Faison joined a Discord server created by her friend Joshua Citarella. “A bunch of us were super online during the pandemic,” recalls the Baltimore-based video artist and filmmaker. “Politics were on everyone’s mind, but it felt like there was a discursive gap.” So, participants formed a weekly book club to help guide their conversations, which inspired many to produce essays and artworks. The Do Not Research Substack was created as an online platform for these pieces, alongside other commissions, that probe the “emerging online subcultures, political trends and different phenomena” indicative of our current moment. “It very quickly felt like a truly organic creative community,” she reflects, “one that forever altered my arts practice.”

After graduating from Towson University in 2017 with a degree in film and philosophy, Faison found herself “a little bit more excited by the fine arts space than the narrative cinema space.” In 2019, she debuted her three-part solo show entitled Phase Change, which explored Gilles Deleuze’s notion of becoming via phases of a hydraulic cycle. The installation featured a seven-foot stream simulation, an 8mm film projection and bricks that Faison hand-carried into the space during its year-long run. “The gallery is a really good place to ask questions that don’t quite fit in anywhere else,” she notes. Lack Loop, Faison’s ongoing multichannel video installation project, uses collage, self-portrait, narration and “meme-politics” to examine absence and desire. Her 2023 work, Carousel #1, displays 81 35mm slides—either taken by Faison, procured second-hand or transposed onto celluloid from internet images—as they continuously loop through a carousel projector.

A major creative pivot occurred amid the January 6 Capitol riots, the orchestration of which she followed by lurking on sites like TheDonald.win. Equipped with her Bolex, she captured a historical event on 16mm that has predominantly been documented via “choppy livestream footage.” The resultant installation, First As Tragedy, Then as LARP, became the artist’s first NYC solo exhibition. Faison’s footage plays on a loop, flanked by two banners depicting the Greek gods of tragedy and comedy, riffing on the famous Marx quote as well as the “top text/bottom text” meme format. “I cut the film on a Steenbeck and kept the process fully analog,” Faison notes. “It could exist as this object amongst other objects, and meaning could be built through that presence in the gallery.”

Journeying outside of the white cube, Faison’s next endeavor interrogates her relationship with neighbor Rose, a frequent inspiration of hers who’s “a little bit older, drinks a lot, and maybe isn’t always fully aware of the ways I’m utilizing her subjectivity, personhood and image.” Filtered through the open call Lars von Trier shared during the summer of 2023 for sexual and artistic stimulation, Application to Be Lars von Trier’s “Female Girlfriend/Muse” winks at the Dogme 95 movement while also critiquing one of its most eminent figures. “Lars’s video is very creepy and weird, directly asking for a woman to suck dry like a vampire,” Faison opines. “But, it also caused me to look in the mirror for a second.” A five-minute version of the short played last year at Scrap Yard Screenings, a “film and video mini-festival” organized by Faison, while a 15-minute version will play at Baltimore’s New/Next Festival in October.

Currently, she is preparing for the premiere of Transformers: Terminal, which she produced and co-penned with her former movie theater co-worker Miles Engel-Hawbecker (who directs). It centers on Aidan, a “basement-dwelling nerd” who travels to Comic-Con to meet “the e-girl vlogger of his dreams,” only to find that they don’t have a spark IRL. Described as “a rom-com about fandom that morphs into a body horror film about commodity fetishism and the parasocial,” it’s set to premiere this fall in conjunction with Rhizome, the New Museum’s digital art and culture offshoot. Pandemic unemployment payments were vital for making the film, which was co-written by Faison and her former movie theater co-worker Miles Engel-Hawbecker in reaction to incessant IP recycling. “When working in a more traditional cinematic context, I’m invested in the incredibly powerful tool of narrative and humor,” Faison says of her progressive shift from gallery to theater. “If I’m going to trap someone in a dark room for X number of minutes, I don’t necessarily want to force them to think about Lacanian notions of lack and desire.”—Natalia Keogan/Image: Phoebe Oathout