Before twenty years ago, it started much earlier.

In the early 1980s, I was drawn to MTV. Not for the music, but for the visuals. The way images moved and shifted, telling stories without needing words, stayed with me. That was the beginning.

At home, my family had a VHS camera and a VCR. That became my first studio. I spent hours experimenting, recording, rewinding, and trying different ideas just to see what would happen. There was no plan behind it. No audience in mind. I would only show those videos to family and friends. Everything existed within a small, local circle.

But even then, one question kept coming back to me. How do I show this to strangers?

That question stayed with me for years. It was not about fame or scale. It was about connection with someone I did not already know. Someone outside of my immediate world.

In 2006, something finally shifted. I found a way to share my work beyond that local space. What had once lived in a living room could now move outward. I did not know what to expect, but what happened next changed everything.

People I had never met began to watch. They responded. They connected. What started as something personal began to reach beyond me.

As a Deaf artist working through visual language and American Sign Language, I have always experienced communication differently. It does not depend on sound. It lives in movement, expression, and rhythm. It allows meaning to travel in a way that does not need traditional translation.

Over time, I began to understand something that was always there but not yet clear. You do not need to start global to reach global. You can begin locally and still move outward.

To know global is to recognize that your work can travel beyond where it begins. It can reach people in different places, with different perspectives, and still hold meaning. To act local is to stay grounded in how you create. It means continuing to work from your own environment, your own experiences, and your own way of seeing.

Those early VHS experiments mattered more than I realized at the time. They were small and unseen by most, but they built the foundation for everything that came later. They were local, but they carried something that could eventually move beyond that.

Now, I find myself returning to the idea of connection again, but in a different way. Not just between people, but between spaces. Between what is physical and what is digital. Between what is in front of us and what exists beyond it.

A gesture can move from one place into another. A moment can exist in more than one space at the same time.

This idea continues to unfold in my current work. I am not focused on explaining it completely. I am more interested in allowing it to be experienced in its own way.

Connection is not something that needs to be defined.

It is something that is felt.