These short films were made in parallel with the artist book When I Was There and the Ciphers series of paintings. Each film returns to the site where a graffiti tag was found and photographed — the starting point for a painting. Walking through the neighborhood, I read the text written for that work, tracing the connections between place, mark, and memory that the paintings explore. Taken together, the films ground the painted abstractions in the concrete geography of the city — extending the logic of the book's photographic index into moving image.

The first film below introduces the project as a whole: how it began, how it developed, and what it means to transcribe an anonymous mark into a painting.