This collection of short videos prompts viewers to engage with the absurdity of life, the enigmatic nature of death and the meaning beyond routine and the distractions of living. Stemming from my recent videos exploring the grief response, this work offers an apparatus for approaching the uncertain inevitable with humor and humility.

Introducing new member Leigh Davis

On-Off, & Interruptions: An Interview with Leigh Davis and emily brandt

Leigh Davis, one of Temp.Files’ new Season 4 members, is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural organizer, who’s been archiving end-of-life experiences for over a decade. In this new video “Ashes Ashes,” Davis is thinking through family, interruptions and domestic distractions as an apparatus, and of course D for death. In this conversation, Leigh and returning Temp.Files artist emily brandt discuss karaoke, disrupted expectations, the air element, and moments before moments, as they relate to Davis’ body of work and this new video, in particular.

emily brandt: I thought we could start not by talking about the piece for Temp.Files. I'm curious to hear about your project “Karaoke in the Cemetery.”

Leigh Davis: It has been really something. I’m so pleased with how the first one rolled out. I’m still processing it, because it was a lot to process. That work, that project, is something I've been building on for a decade. A lot of it is about creating this container, and then just being invisible. And it's really beautiful to be able to design something that people will enter. It's completely uncertain what will happen. I mean, there's a caretaking, guiding element that I have, where it's like before care and after care. But in general, I'm basically creating this container for people to come in, and they are the project, and I really really like that. I mean, I think it's kind of what we need. Like, people coming over the threshold into a cemetery that has its own identity and its own history and your own understanding of how you feel spiritually, and that's what the project's about. It's its own living thing inside the space.

eb: Because of the people who are there, and the choices they’re making?

LD: And because of the way that those spaces have been used. I'm working with cemeteries that haven't done this kind of thing before. It's radical for them. But it's also because right now, that's the kind of work I need to make. I'm living in Washington, D.C.  My day-to-day life is very much about watching people be oppressed, watching discrimination. I mean, everyone's looking at it, right? It's so present. I need to work through it, and create space for people to express what's happening. It matters to me. That's why I make art in the first place.

eb: How is karaoke doing that?

LD: The karaoke is just the prompt for people to get into a room together. Just showing up, you are experiencing the project. You're participating. It's really about getting a group in a room together, to witness and commune, and I know that's such a basic thing. We’re all just needing it so fucking badly. People are longing to be in a group of like-minded people who want to be together in grief. And so that is the project. The karaoke is the spectacle that can bring people inside of it. And the installation is an alluring pull for people to come, but then once they get there, it's a carved-out place for them to create. I'm interested in how simple it is to create a space for people to come. And then they can express. And I love music. I'm very musically oriented. I sing, I've been in choirs. Music is very present and completely transportive, so even just hearing different choices people are making about music is powerful.

eb: What songs were resonating for you, or the group?

LD: The complete variety! People singing Spanish ballads I've never heard, a German opera, and then everybody jamming to Stevie Wonder, and then someone sang this Replacements song, “Swinging Party.” And when someone couldn't sing, and was struggling, everyone would sing for them. It was this communal singing that I really, really love. One that was so potent was two people, probably in their early 20s, who were really close friends, and were both Black, young people, in DC, and they were talking about how someone in one of their families is dying and doesn't want to talk about it, and then they sang a Taylor Swift song. When they sang it, it was so genuinely moving, and I thought, Taylor Swift has never done this to me. It’s completely transformed my experience of this music.

eb: I'm interested in the role that this project is pulling you into: the artist as one who creates an experience and brings people together. Do you see that as a deepening of something that's been in your practice for some time, or is that something new?

LD: It's definitely a deepening, but now it's more urgent. I need it more than before. I have created other experiences where it's about trying to gather, but it's never been so specific before. I'm very much a collaborator. I've done different collaborative works with grief and with different people, but this is very different, kind of random. I don’t know who’s going to come, I don't know what they're feeling, I don't know what they're expressing. I definitely have been building on this interest in creating group experiences. You read off of each other, and I believe in being in physical space in a room with people. It's very important to me, as a teacher, as an artist, as a person. And because I've deeply trained in oral history, I am very attuned to cues, prompts, people's body language, the way their voices shift, the way someone intonates a word. I'm very attuned to listening in a way that I think has really changed my practice. Since the pandemic, I've been really training in listening.

eb: I want to bring that forward with us as we think about “Ashes Ashes.” One thread throughout your work, even this karaoke project, is a clear holding of both the absolute individuality of death and grief, as well as this interconnected universality. And by “universality,” I don't just mean death as inevitable for all of us and all who we love, but I also mean that in this moment in history we feel and experience so deeply the intensity of mass death and of genocide and war and of unprecedented violence and climate change accelerating at such a rapid pace that it's not even really comprehensible, right? And we're responding to this immense overload that is actually, I would argue, biologically impossible to cognitively process.

LD: Agreed.

eb: It's beyond what we're capable of, and here we are fumbling our way through. And your work holds that hugeness, along with the more distilled, intimate, individual experience of loss, death, grief. And it holds both with care, even as there is sometimes a tone that’s sharper, more probing. That sharpness warrants an emotional response from us, even one that’s panicked or frustrated at first. That first emotional layer is really complicated. In this present work, we feel that with the clock, immediately. This ticking clock looms from the beginning, and the meaning and stress and tension of time is really felt, but there's something in the tone of the clock that is quite surprising and odd.

LD: It's this constant management of being alive right now, while also consistently pointing to a future, pointing to an uncertain other time. It's like we're in two times all the time. For me, I can be very present, working on mundane things, like daily tasks or domestic duties or parenting, but yet there's this other time that is constantly there, and I can look at it. I can acknowledge that, and what am I doing about it? Am I fussing around? Am I freaking the fuck out? When I make my work, I am not thinking about a plan, ever. The immediacy of this moment, where I'm making this work for this group of people in temp.files and this deadline… it's all about how my inner clock, my inner time, is working on a physical level.

eb: You're in both timelines.

LD: And the constant reminder of it is these children that I am parenting. With these humans to be present with, concerned about in a future world--whatever that fucking means--I have a kind of toggling going between, and they are a reference point.

eb: In “Ashes Ashes,” the future is looming, but so is the present. I was interested in the working document that you shared with Temp.Files members, your project notes. I loved the constellation of objects: the foil blankets and the YouTube videos, and the videos that you had shot, and the photos. I see you collecting these different things that intuitively are resonating with you. How do you find the links in the constellation?

LD: That's the best part. It takes me so long to make work, so this Temp.Files deadline is fast. It takes me a year to make one short video. I think that document is the work, in a way, because the document is my brain associating things that may or may not go together yet. Yet, they do really resonate for me, and then once I sit down to edit, that document is there as a kind of skeleton of concepts that I'm working with. It's just writing lists and thinking out loud, and then going on YouTube and starting to download videos. That process of gathering is what my work is about. That's where all of the connections start to happen, and I really love looking at people's videos online, because they're so specific and they're so mundane and created with such care. There's so much care involved in people making these. I have a lot of interest in the portal.

eb: Then when you're sitting down to begin making a cut, what's guiding you through? How are you making the decisions?

LD: The first thing is going through, watching everything again, and starting to make connections. I make notes, and then some things just happen very quickly. For example, for some reason, I wanted a fake swan, because I was thinking about fake animals. Like a child's obsession with stuffed animals, toys as animals that are then personified. I was interested in these connections that my kids have with all these fake animals, and then I was thinking about real nature. And how that represents what's next. Because everything's going to be extinct, and then I thought oh, I'm gonna find this swan, and push it into the water as though I'm pushing my babies away and I’m pulling them back. So everything I'm doing is this process of trying it, and then discarding it or keeping it, and then it somehow gets connected later. It’s taking notes between connections of images, and those images are saying something, right?

eb: And you're also listening to your desires.

LD: And I have to say that these past two years, I’ve been making these short videos, very, very bite-sized, next to each other in groupings. Since 2022, I've been gathering. Now it's 2025. So that gathering process, which is kind of insane, is an archive of all these ideas, and they don't all get worked out. And then I have a deadline. And I have to work them out, and it's pretty much the most pleasure that one could have making things. This kind of editing, it's so delicious to me, and deep. It's heaven for me. It feels very much like a gift of time when I have the ability to be able to sit with that stuff. It doesn't feel like labor at all. It feels pleasurable. And I can laugh, and I can be like, oh, this is funny. You know, things that don't happen in regular time. And I really need that to survive this place.

eb: There are many places in “Ashes Ashes” where expectation is disrupted. Could you talk a little bit about disrupted expectation in this video?

LD: I'm interested in this space people can get into where they expect it doesn't happen, and then they're left, but I don't want to leave them on their own, with nothing to grab onto. So, how do I leave, yet there's still something? There's a lot of people who have watched and said I feel all these things and I don't know what they mean. And I say that's really important, let's talk about it. There’s this wanting to bring you in so that you have to think about why you feel that way. And I know that that's a lot to ask. My concern about my work sometimes is if the probing and then pulling away can leave people confused and left, and there is a part of me that does care about how that person feels.

eb: Like, your child's voice says, “Escape,” and then nothing follows.

LD: Right, but also the reason that these videos are so joyful and free for me to make is to say we don't fucking know, and why don't we sit with these feelings that are very hard or confusing, or don't make any sense, and grapple with them for a minute. That's the grief response part of this. This work is about grief generally, but everyone has a different grief response. You can laugh, you can feel strange, but there's an underlying layer that I'm hoping connects it all. I love this phrase: disrupted expectation. It's a good way to describe something that I'm doing intentionally. And how to be careful with that, depending on the context someone's watching in, depending on who the audience is. Also my work is very site oriented. When I show my work, I'm really thinking, who is watching this, and where are we? Which I do care about a lot.

eb: I feel your care coming through in the form of a very real presencing, without evaluation. It might sometimes feel a bit detached or aloof, but not in a way that's emotionless. In a way that, to me, is pretty radical, actually. That's pretty practiced. Being a very good listener. It's that. How do you stay really present with this thing that might be a disruption, or might be evocative, without leaning too much into that? Your earlier edit had a really evocative example of this: the child, presumably your kid, was playing at choking, with no sound. Different viewers would bring their own reactions to that. And yet, the way that it was presented, it is slow, and present, and doesn't feel like it’s trying to be shocking, or trying to be emotive. It's just like: this is the thing. Let’s look at it together.

LD: That's actually really important.

eb: We are much more used to being led through, or even manipulated through, an emotional experience.

LD: Very much.

eb: So how do you presence yourself while you're creating these images?

LD: Oh, I'm so present. This is deep work for me. I’m processing my own experience through it. It's an incredibly useful tool for me. It's therapeutic. It's very dearly helpful. The last video is a good example of collaborating with my child and talking to him about death, fake dying, and this whole conversation, which nobody needs to hear, leads up to this thing. There's something really beautiful about being able to talk about this, and also then do it together. Laugh at it. I talk about the truth of it, why I'm making it. And then for him to look at the camera at the end, to be like haha. Because he's not just play dying. He looks at me. And that part is the most important part, because it's a kind of playing. I'm playing with all of these things that we're dealing with, and I think the only way for me to personally be present in them is to play. And I really believe that it's a way to process what's happening, the darkness of it. And it does feel generative.

eb: It's the play, it's the laughter, it's the presencing, it's the processing.

LD: And it's all of the research that builds up to those processings. It's all part of the same: all the things I'm reading, all the videos on my phone, when something weird happens to me. We're working all the time. We're not in and out of this.

eb: The living is the working.

LD: But what I don't want to do in my work is for that personal part to be what this work is, ever, because to me, that completely loses another viewer. The point is to create something that other people can actually  process on their own, and to separate it from myself. So there is a dance between how much is shared.

eb: We need that specificity to strike a chord, but we don't need so much that it becomes about the narrative. What has the role of laughter and humor been in the process of grieving and making work about grief?



LD: About two or three years ago, I’d been grieving, making work, grieving, very quietly. And then I came to this point in my cycle of grief. I think grief cycles are very interesting. What is that? And does it end, and where are you? There's all this literature about the five stages, which is total bullshit. I reached a point after the pandemic, because the pandemic was such an important time, that I started to allow my grief to spill out differently, and more wildly, more open and flying out, instead of being contained. That has really changed my work. The first time I was able to do that was in this work called “Feeling Tones” that I did at Greenwood. I really allowed myself to laugh, and bring laughter and humor deeply into the work. Also, some horror, and disgust, along with full on humor. It really did open up a whole shift for me. I think it was just the cycle I'm in. And that also lead to the karaoke project, because there was a karaoke sequence in another video I made that was very abrasive, that would come in, and people were like, wait, am I supposed to sing? Where's this karaoke coming from? In a way, it was hilarious. It's been building to be this more audible grief.

eb: Again, it's about presencing or being with and relating directly, as opposed to numbing out.

LD: Yeah, the opposite of repression.

eb: We need more of that. It's beautiful to see that in your work. So, in addition to the motifs of capitalism—the clock, the plastic house building, Amazon scrolling—there's also a presence of the air element in “Ashes Ashes.” We get the wind in this powerful hurricane shot, but we also have the air conditioner, and the bubbles in the foot bath, and the vent, and the sound of the breathiness juxtaposed with machines, and then, of course, the choking at the end.



LD: When I first started, I was going to do something based on the four elements. And I can see these works becoming four elements. I have so much footage of different elements, and I'm interested in how people speak about the elements from different perspectives. I've downloaded all these videos. But I've been very focused on my lungs for the past few years, because I was very sick, and had felt for the first time, wow, I am not in an able body. I couldn't breathe. So, the breathing element is definitely subconscious. This air, and how we breathe inside, outside, wind, oxygen. I've been so focused on my lungs. I thank my lungs every time I do something that makes me breathe. There's a lot there, actually. And there's probably more there to explore.

eb: There's a balance between natural manifestations of air in wind, in breath, and then these machine-assisted air contraptions. “Ashes Ashes” is pointing at the unsettling assistance of machines, or other human-made interventions in our daily lives.

LD: I'm thinking about machines, but I don't want it to be about that. In my video before this, I was using a lot of dated technology, purposefully. Someone pushes the answering machine button with their finger, and then a mourning song comes on, and they go and turn it off. There's an on-off button that I'm interested in. There's an on-off button for a lot of people, and a lot of people just turn it off.

eb: In your work, I see a lot of care for the before moment. On your website’s about page, you have an image of “11:59.” That's so emblematic of this tension: this isn't the thing, this is right before the thing. The interest is in the pre-moment, not the moment itself.

LD: There’s anticipation involved. I was so deeply connected to sitting vigil for many years with people who were dying. That’s a very transitory space to be sitting with. Again, listening, again, silence. It’s not death, it's the waiting. It's the waiting for someone to die that is the most difficult part. For me, part of the reason to train to sit vigil is about being comfortable with waiting. And sitting. Which is hard.

eb: That's the image of the children playing in the pool with the black smoke. That's the training.

LD: Totally. It's training, and so there's preparation involved. I think I make this work to be in preparation. That feels real to me.

eb: So this work is an invitation into a collaborative preparation.

LD: Yeah, it's really good to talk it out loud with you, because talking with other people is how I figure out my own work.

eb: Your work is so process-driven, even as the products are so compelling. I admire and appreciate, and am inspired by that.

LD: Thank you. What was hard about sharing the work with other people was wondering, do I need to protect this work for a little bit longer, and work through some experiences? But no, because then I wouldn't have made the work. I was laughing at myself, because it's so raw and important to be in this process with people who are basically still strangers to me.

eb: It's a weird and freeing process.

LD: Yeah, that was a really important precipice, to just get people's feelings about the work, and then just make it, right. It helps me to remember why I make this work, which is the whole reason.