Secret Weapons is an experimental animated filmic essay that tries to work through the emotional and political confusion that has shaped the way I, and many other young Queer Aboriginal artists, relate to the world. After looking at the films of Mike Hoolboom, my thoughts began to centre on the experiences of growing up under the fear of AIDS in the 1990s, and of the cultural loss and grief that has cycled through the Native community since colonization began. I divided the image into four channels to reference Hoolboom’s film Frank’s Cock, while also reinterpreting the framework of the four channels as a digital medicine wheel. Each channel represents a different part of the medicine wheel, a different part of life’s journey, a different part of the whole self.

The animated channel of Secret Weapons gave me an opportunity to move the scope of the film beyond my internal monologue to engage with my network of artists, activists, youth, and allies in the Queer & Aboriginal communities. Each of them manipulated the same set of images in a different way, creating a moving portrait of a community, my own network of Secret Weapons.

Commissioned for CFMDC ReGeneration.