Artist Statement

The first book I remember reading was called City. It had rounded corners and a hundred words. Abstraction hadn’t dawned on me yet, so I was mainly moved by the pictures: Skyscrapers, cabs at their feet, shone gold. Twenty years later I climbed out of Penn Station and discovered it again: New York City, the archetypal metropolis.

I approach book arts, photography and printmaking with a sociologist in my ear. I’m interested in the ways such images come to speak for things and vice versa. One sees this metonymic sleight-of-hand in advertisements everyday. But selling a car (or a city) means removing the textures of life that complicate the equation of new car = happiness. In my work, I flip this approach on its head. Complication, ambiguity, and non sequitur are deliberate, suggesting irony and inviting the viewer to decide for themselves what an image conveys. In one of my photographs, an elderly man towers over a child. Is he playing or scolding—Gepetto or The Scrooge? By folding the image into a 3D pop-up made from a 2D print and photographing it again, I extend the contradiction even further. 

Like this image, much of my portfolio betrays documentarian roots. From focal length and wide proximity to gritty black-and-white, I draw from the visual vocabulary of journalism to convey the reality that, in most cases, what you see in my prints really did happen—or did it? A boy is engrossed in play—then again maybe he’s angry. Verisimilitude, in this way, is a starting point that expands when I sequence images and text. The world of thought and the world of material reality hum into harmony: The moon is a potato, and four moon-men accept a swirling beacon from on high.

My latest work draws from my enduring interest in the history of thought. Common but incomplete notions like progress and discovery suffuse our contemporary ethos, sustained through politics, educational institutions, and art. To critically engage with this process, I am working on a book project comprising my own images with text drawn from a range of sources relevant to (but not always recognized in) the production of knowledge: a medieval mystic and nun, astronauts flying to the moon, Native American elders, a feminist historian, and an enlightenment philosopher. Through these elements I poke and prod at the conventional relationship between image and text. I also voice critique—of media culture, the way we value (or disenfranchise) certain intellectual histories to push facile narratives of progress—and reflect upon the problematic origins of social documentary and the photobook itself.

Part of this project is aimed at involving the viewer: I invite viewers to consider how context reinforces narrative (and therefore meaning), both in a book and in lived experience. What does a sequence of street photographs say about documentary and the experience of being observed? More abstractly, what can a shrimp tell us about science, progress, or humanity if a laboratory specimen’s image sits comfortably next to a quote drawn straight from a colonialist’s journal entry describing his discovery—and manipulation—of Indigenous Americans? 

In that vein, my work engages with certain uncomfortable truths that complicate a facile story of ourselves as humans and our inexorable search for meaning. Given this depth, I seek to sustain a sense of play in my work, one I foster through full-bleed, velvety prints bound in a hearty volume or, more playfully yet, the self-referential nature of images imaged in an image. Such objects, like a boy’s first board book, really stick with you.