I lived in New York for about 15 years and it was the hay days of newsstands and magazines and bookstores. We went to Central Park West. Sunday nights the would be bundles of magazines like in the streets. For a person who had obsessively collected images, it was like a light bulb went off in my head. So I spent a lot of time flipping through magazines, buying magazine, and cutting out the images just like designers have mood boards. That's what they are, they are mood boards. Most people who work on commercials and stuff, they do some version of this. It's just for me, from the beginning I used them to corral ideas around specific film projects. But at some point it was like anything that I was interested in. The pictures moved from just being in between the pages of a sketch book to being in a proper book where they could be displayed or shared with people. I've long since stopped making books. As soon as I got my first laptop and stumbled onto Bridge and Adobe Creative Suite, there was the internet, all of a sudden, there was Google and you could just search images. Apex is a file, foremost, and you get to see it as a grid. With Apex in particular, it was a bunch of images that I had gathered in relationship to a narrative, like there's a script and all this other kind of stuff to go with it. If you look at it globally, you can see there's a certain almost tonal thing that's happening. It's in the blues and the blacks, occasionally have these bursts of red. Apex, as much as anything, it is the most advanced implementation of these things that I had discovered or read about or stumbled on. I think it's fairly human to recoil from things that are disturbing. I definitely train myself to push towards things that disturb me. If something disturbs me, first and foremost I'm just fascinated by why I'm disturbed. I'm interested in how a picture which is not real can affect you. Showing pain is hard and I've had a cut out of this since I was 17 years old. It is a back which is marked in a very complicated way. It's the most beautiful image I've ever seen and I was forced to articulate a complexity of an image that's both horrifying and attractive. Why is it that I think that particularly image is the emblem of the black experience in the Americas? Ex-slave Gordon which by and large pops in almost everything that I do, as much as anything an emblem of how the black experience is this complex of majesty and misery that are like inextricably bound up. There's something more powerful about taking the thing that is the most abject thing and making it the most valuable thing. It's all associative. It's all about relation. What is the relationship between the thing that's in front of you, the thing that proceeded, and the thing that's following? The whole idea was always if you took this thing and that thing and you overlap them, the place in which they overlapped was you.