© 2026 The Couch Critic
“Using a fabricated Old English word as its guiding principle, this ongoing series of (mostly) 16mm films is conceptually organized around the possible meanings that its title elicits - physical voyages, psychedelic journeys, and a phenomenological experience of the world. Begun in 2005 in a somewhat vain attempt to hold cinema up as a mirror to the live and fully embodied reception of the crazy noise music scene in Providence, Rhode Island, the TRYPPS films quickly expanded their formal and critical language to include the various poles of action painting, avant-garde cinema, portraiture, stand-up comedy, global capitalism, and trance-dance a lá Jean Rouch. While the form of these works varies radically from one to the next, when taken as a whole they can be seen to enunciate what their maker calls "psychedelic ethnography" - a practice whose aim is a knowledge of the Self/self, a movement towards understanding in which the trip is both the means and the end.” – Ben Russell
"A night sky fills with light shimmers and flecks, surface markings, heavenly bodies. It’s an ocean, a well, a screen, a mirror, a portal. Blackness/void cluttered by growing ephemera. Dark reaches of outer and inner space gradually sifts through shards of granite and diamonds. The mind races as the material becomes greater and more frenetic, reaching a nearly audibly grinding pitch of excitement, flurry, and instantaneous infinity that ebbs at first and then maintains. Flashes of color emerge or are imagined. Chaotic flickering of dancing peasant girls and violently twisting astronaut helmets. Layers of sea slime over undulating life forms. Bonfires and celebration. Explosions, construction. Holocausts. Primordial ooze, modern civilization. Ages and seconds. Floating heads circle kaleidoscopic bursts of shiny beads. Everything everywhere twists, forces through, transforms into, overlaps everything else." - JT Rogstad, The International Exposition (TIE)
"A fine fine example of spaces between existing as objects themselves. A patternistic and memorializing offering to natural totems. Two kinds of reversal at play involving black and white as well as reflection and overlap. These simple elements create a hurried maze of twisting antler branches, twigs, and dissected slices of pure “space.” I can hear the crackling fires, echoing elk calls and frosty despair…" - JT Rogstad, The International Exposition
The third part in a series of films dealing with naturally-derived psychedelia. Shot during a performance by Rhode Island noise band Lightning Bolt, this film documents the transformation of a rock audience’s collective freak-out into a trance ritual of the highest spiritual order.
Using a 35mm strip of motion picture slug featuring the recently deceased American comedian Richard Pryor, this extended Rorschach assault on the eyes moves out of a flickering chaos created by incompatible film gauges into a punchline involving historically incompatible racial stereotypes.
A short treatise on the semiotics of capital, happiness, and phenomenology under the flickering neon of global capitalism.
From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It’s Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set.
"TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman's LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell's unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence." - Michael Green, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago