Home

A common benchmark for becoming a “New Yorker” is having lived in New York City for 10 years. What happens when that milestone passes? “Home” is a personal documentary following a New York City transplant as she examines her relationship with the idea of home after living in New York for 10 years by revisiting the five apartments she has lived in during the past decade. Through conversations with former roommates, supers, and by returning to old neighborhoods, this documentary takes us through different meanings of home and paints a portrait of one New Yorker’s past decade in the city.a

Credits: 

Recorded and produced by Debbie Rolf. Special thanks to Ashley, Kali, and Sonya.

Thrown Away
“Thrown Away”, is a collage series originally completed for the class Emerging Media I in Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts MFA Program that was motivated by my own observations of how many usable items were being left on the curb. It struck me that these items did not have to me thrown away. They were only trash because someone chose not to reuse them, or to make them available for reuse. This choice made them no different than the many types of garbage that we have no means of reusing or recycling.

All of the background images are photographs of items that were left out for trash in my neighborhood on the Upper East Side during the Spring of 2021. I searched for items that were in good condition and not noticeably defective or damaged. All of the items they are covered in are scans of pieces of trash that I personally accumulated and threw away throughout the course of this project. The trash elements are either not widely recyclable (like the waxed paper that tea bags are packaged in), or not recyclable at all (like plastic tape). 

The larger reusable items pictured should not all be immediately recognizable. My intention is for the viewer to have to work to recognize them because once they are thrown away, they are trash and no different than the items covering them.

Bedford Avenue

“Bedford Avenue” is a soundscape of a bike ride along Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. I mounted a Tascam DR-40x recorder onto the handlebars of my bike and recorded my ride along Bedford Avenue over the course of several weekends in September and October 2020, ultimately recording 6 different rides. I used the audio from 4 of them to create this piece. I also used the same Tascam to record my bike in my apartment as I spun the wheels and moved the pedals to isolate the sounds of the gears and wheels turning.

This piece is meant to transport the listener along Bedford Avenue from my apartment near Brooklyn College to the end in Sheepshead Bay. The sounds of the bike were intended to reflect the transitions between different neighborhoods. This project was originally completed for the class Sound Fields in Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts MFA Program.