Artist Statement
In 2020, I experienced an artistic awakening at the urgings of my hypnotherapist, who proposed I fix the psychological wanderings of our sessions in physical form. I had always wanted to be an artist but lacked the courage to accept the calling. Somehow, coming out as an artist felt more daunting than the time before. With the world in ruins and nothing to lose, I began building a new world through photography—with the hopes of penetrating my interior and portraying something deeper about the world we inhabit.
‘What Does Marble Think as It’s Being Sculpted?’ (2023-ongoing) utilizes a range of photographic methods, from documentary to abstraction, to mold our physical surroundings into a world of metaphor; a world where previous versions-of-self can be examined and collapsed; a world that shows our civilizations personality as an aggressive-future-oriented one that has fallen out of balance with the natural world.
This project juxtaposes personal inquisitions into the metaphysical, with spaces of science, and pseudo-science—with the hopes of discovering areas of overlap between these seemingly contradictory efforts and creating tension between the known and the unknown. Perhaps the physicist’s desire to decode the universe is comparable to a sustained art practice, or a moment of queer-euphoria—all of which can evoke something beyond our understanding. Merging these explorations, through book and exhibition form, allows me to simulate fictional archives from within the world I’m creating—further confounding the real and the illusory, and pointing towards the construction of photography, self, and masculinity—all of which remain entangled with a society obsessed with an illusion of progress, at the mercy of our very nature and human decency.
In 1971, Loren Eisley published ‘The Invisible Pyramid’ in reaction to the Apollo 11 moon landing: “Humanities crossing into the realm of space (and science) has forced them to equally turn and contemplate with renewed intensity the world of the sunflower forest—the ancient world of the body that they are doomed to inhabit, the body that completes their cosmic prison” Ultimately, the worlds I’m building aim to blur the line between looking outwards and looking within, with the charge of unraveling the insidious side-effects of late-capitalist-culture. These efforts hinge upon the belief that photography allows us to tip-toe into spaces unknown to our senses, where all things are created and imagination blossoms.
