Artist Statement
My photographs are made to feel familiar yet disquieting. In the way seeing an old friend becomes unsettling by calling your taste into question. The duplicity of recognizing and rejecting is the line my work walks. I construct images that reveal the theatricality of metamorphosis in the self and the material - believing the self, like a photograph, can be a construction of conscious choice. How people and objects, through transformation, change their relationship to one another and the external world is a primary interest in my work. Humor and absurdity appear through color and artifice redefining the aesthetic conventions of advertising under more playful and light-hearted terms.
It might seem antithetical to picture making to say that when I compose a photograph the last thing I am thinking about is photography. Someone I grew to dislike once told me that if you want something you can’t look directly at it. I’ve thought a lot about this over the years, and have understood it to mean that the substance of all things lives in the periphery. Intuitively we learn about what we can’t see precisely where everything begins to fall apart.
What I do think about when making a picture are the sounds the photograph might make if it were to punctuate a page or announce itself in a room. I think about the translation that occurs when reading music notes on a page. How looking becomes sound and then a movement the body makes, absorbed and internalized to live its own life inside of you.
