VIDEO WORK

Creative Philosophy
I call myself a videomaker to emphasize my belief that video is a material, whether in tape or digital forms, as generative as charcoal, a paintbrush, or clay for artistic experimentation, practice, and exhibition. My video work explores landscapes, topographies, memory, embodiment, intersubjectivity, and the impact of HIV/AIDS in Black communities.
The Baylander IX-514 is a meditation on how lost loved ones and memories can be embodied within physical structures. My brother, Ross Bruce Cheairs III, was stationed aboard the IX-514 during his search-and-rescue helicopter training in Pensacola, FL. It is now a seasonal restaurant and bar, The Baylander, on the West Harlem Pier in New York City. Ross passed away suddenly on the night of July 4, 2021.

The Baylander IX-514 (2025)

Voices at the Gate (2021)

Originally commissioned by Visual AIDS for Day (without) Art in 2021, Voices explores the bucolic landscapes surrounding women's prisons in Upstate New York as central sites of memory, liminality, mutual aid, care, solidarity, and HIV/AIDS activism. Poems, interviews, and essays from archives have been recorded by present-day HIV/AIDS activists, writers, and poets to witness the presences, essences, and traces of these women. Voices at the Gate was screened in over one hundred venues in the US and internationally and featured on the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles' website.

Ending Silence, Shame, and Stigma: HIV/AIDS in the African American Family (2013)

Recorded over a six-year period, Ending Silence is a thirty-minute documentary produced in Atlanta, GA, chronicling the impact of HIV/AIDS on Black families. These intimate portraits reveal the complex and intersectional realities of HIV & AIDS and its entanglement with the personal, medical, political, spiritual, and familial lives in the Black community.
ENDING SILENCE SCREENINGS & COMMUNITY CONVERSATIONS Past Present Future: The Ongoing AIDS Epidemic in Four Documents. Union Docs. Brooklyn, NY. January 2018 Queer Art & Film Festival. Video Revival. Brooklyn, NY. October 2017 Iris House. New York, NY. February 2015 The New School. New York, NY. May 2014 New York University. New York, NY. February 2014 Black Women Film Festival Official Selection. Atlanta, GA. June 2013 Langston Hughes African American Film Festival Official Selection. Seattle, WA. April 2013 Martin Luther King, Jr. National Day of Service Event. Washington, DC. January 2013
Creating AIDS Competent Churches and Church Leaders Conference. Atlanta, GA. December 2012
Ending Silence has been sold to such institutions as Stanford, NYU, Georgetown, Boston College, Oberlin, Duke University, Texas A&M University, Rutgers, and UC Berkeley.
Institutional and Personal DVD copies available for purchase soon!

Additional Video Work