Background

A graduate of Allegheny College with a bachelor's in Film and Art, Science, and Innovation, Thomas's art and filmmaking focus on the intersections of gender, memory, and queer life by challenging notions of authorship and countering ongoing exploitation of the working class through an empathetic art and filmmaking process and the queer (left) lens.

They are well-versed in overseeing all facets of film production, from conceptual development to the final cut. They are proficient and adaptable in most behind-the-scenes positions and related equipment. They are versed in technical arts to create innovative audio-visual products in 2D and 3D spaces and want to produce groundbreaking short and feature-length films.

Thomas’s artworks have been informed by art movements like Social Realism, Memory Art, Posthumanism, and Queer Art with artists such as Tracey Emin, Wangechi Mutu, and Gran Fury. Their films are inspired by Third Cinema, Social Realism, New Queer Cinema, and filmmakers such as Spike Lee, Cheryl Dunye, Gus Van Sant, Kimberly Pierce, and Vittorio De Sica. They often reference communications scholars such as Barbara Risman, Jack Halberstam, and Kristina Gupta in conversations about gender and sexuality.

Thomas’s most recent works critique (hetero) normative culture and explore the boundaries and limitations of mutual love and the deathly consequences for such. Through dramatic gendered lighting, saturated colors, and permanent symbolic destruction of valuable objects, they deconstruct and reform masculine art and film conventions in favor of new loving art forms that privilege the socioeconomic welfare of the working class. Thomas’s piece, Straight Lines (2022), marries all of these concepts providing a nonexploitative empathetic filmmaking environment that results in an abstract depiction of queer, asexual love. Straight lines are a masculine structure broken by simply painting curvy (queer) lines. Their multi-media work Comma Period (, .) (2022) explores these normative boundaries of love between masculine people, whether platonic or romantic, through various mediums of projecting onto balloons, cologne, Arduino, interactivity, and mirrors. Thomas’s film Music Box (2023) intends to advance all of these concepts by approaching the paradox of queer death through the depiction of queer memory.

Untitled (2022)

Music Box (2023)

Music Box: Complicating the Queer Paradox with Memory as a Tool for the Queer (Left) Lens

Thomas created Music Box: Complicating the Queer Paradox with Memory as a Tool for the Queer (Left) Lens for their senior capstone project at Allegheny College. The project consists of an extensive comprehensive research paper exploring the histories of queer representation in film, media, and art, an original short film created and directed by Thomas, and a gallery installation of the created short film alongside a documentary of the film’s creation, all of which was produced from January 2023 to April 2023. An excerpt of the film can be found here.

Music Box illustrates the queer paradox: representing queer death with a history of queer regulatory death (Bury Your Gays) tropes and a history of real-life queer death. The narrative film depicts Joy (21), an amnesic genderfluid person on a mission to piece together their life and identity through disembodied fragmented memories defined by their life with Sam (22), their queer love. However, Joy and Sam’s future is disrupted by a traumatic hate crime that severs reality. To restore a future with Sam, Joy must revisit the day they die to alter fate, but this comes with consequences. The two become trapped within the queer paradox resolved through the music box.

The film thematically attempts to represent the queer paradox by inherently disrupting normative expectations of filmmaking. The film’s structure remains largely ambiguous and with blatant metacommentary. Normative forms are deconstructed through the use of different ideological cameras (Android Galaxy S10e as accessible, Instax/Polaroid as still, FujiFilm FinePix S9750 as recycled, and Canon 90D/Canon T6i as institutional), all of which offer different resolutions and aspect ratios. Expectations of sexuality, gender, and filmmaking form unravel throughout the narrative. The film utilizes queer regulatory tropes to critique fantastical and real-life queer death in the forms of asexuality, pansexuality, and Bury Your Gays.

Straight Lines (2022)

However, Music Box also aims to disrupt filmmaking form through collective authorship and dismantling the hierarchical positioning of above-the-line and below-the-line filmmaking structures. The installation positions two realms: documentary (collective) and narrative (singular). The documentary aims to surveil filmmaking form and privilege production over product. This is accomplished through rhythmic editing of documentary footage to the narrative film to offer the viewer a glimpse into the production process and the performative conditions. These realms, separated by a wall, provide seating, attributing to the film’s makers from the perspective of production and product. Ultimately, I offer a filmmaking approach found in the conjunction of queer politics and leftist principles known as the queer left lens.

Overarching Questions

What is the queer left lens?
How does production/product relate to the queer paradox?
What might the separation of the two realms reveal about our relationship with media?
How can we define queer life through a queer left lens?

Music Box (2023)

Awards and Screenings

Thomas’s films have been featured and showcased at the Gladys Mullenix Black Theatre. Their capstone project, Music Box (2023), received high honors for its screening and installation at Gladys Mullenix Black Theatre and Allegheny Art Gallery. Music Box earned two Best Senior Capstone Project awards in the Film and Digital Storytelling and Art, Science, and Innovation programs at Allegheny College for 2023. Music Box has also received a positive response from Short Films Matter, rating 3/5 stars. The review praised the conceptual framework and low-budget execution of the abstract piece with notes of “honesty” and “authenticity.” Short Films Matter also criticized the repeated themes and length of the film, asking for a tighter overall narrative. Short Films Matter also reviewed Straight Lines (2022) with a rating of 4/5 stars. It was praised for its stunning visuals and abstract representation of the queer artist’s pursuit of love. Thomas’s collaborative short film David Dead (2022) received an Audience’s Choice Award for the 48-Hour Film Festival. Their collaborative digital video Digitze-You (2022) and intermedia digital projection piece, “,.” [Comma Period] (2022) was showcased at the Allegheny Art Gallery.

Music Box (2023)