Artist Statement
I make photographs and site-specific installations to catalyze perceptual revelation of the everyday. I look to uncover that which has been lost in practical and utilitarian approaches toward the world. Mindfulness, wonder, and theoretical contemplation operate as a set of alternative dispositions within my work.
For the past five years of my practice I have made photographs of “insignificant” things. The scare quotes indicate that these things are commonly labeled as insignificant, a reading that I intend to challenge. They include: dead bugs, accumulation of scratches on stove tops, air ducts, interior corners of institutional buildings, and leftover holes on a studio wall.
I use the medium of photography because I believe the act of photographing, as well as the resulting images, fundamentally shift the perspectival, temperamental, and psychological position one holds toward the world. In tandem with this medium, I employ a methodology in which I turn to my local surroundings for the subject matter of my work, restricting the range of my artistic exploration to the places I occupy every day. If I am unwilling to find value in this location, I will be unable to find value in any location. My use of photography allows my viewers and myself to rediscover everyday environments through a monumental alteration of perceptual normativity.
My current body of work, These Inadvertent Marks, is a photographic investigation of scuffs, stains, bruises, residue, scratches, holes, and blemishes. These marks are byproducts of human intention. I consider those marks that are largely deemed trivial and peripheral as a means of challenging ordinary value systems and surrendering to the unconsidered. I make these photographs as I wander: a process of discovery and close consideration of urban streets, private homes, airports, bathrooms, alleys, and storefronts. This artistic and theoretical inquiry revolves around themes of the semiotic, autonomous, contingent, and meaningful status of these marks; it asks questions of the constitution of signs, establishment of meaning, excess of intentions, and interpretive instability. Through an investigation of these inadvertent marks, I look to highlight the uncontrollable flux, turbulent drift, and recalcitrant shifting of the status of meaning.
I hope that those who view my work would slow down; to question the very structure by which we are able to move through the world at such great speeds; to pause and consider the things which we have chosen to ignore through our hierarchies of value and utility, things that have plenty to say but to which we have kept our ears shut and eyes closed.
I make photographs and site-specific installations to catalyze perceptual revelation of the everyday. I look to uncover that which has been lost in practical and utilitarian approaches toward the world. Mindfulness, wonder, and theoretical contemplation operate as a set of alternative dispositions within my work.
For the past five years of my practice I have made photographs of “insignificant” things. The scare quotes indicate that these things are commonly labeled as insignificant, a reading that I intend to challenge. They include: dead bugs, accumulation of scratches on stove tops, air ducts, interior corners of institutional buildings, and leftover holes on a studio wall.
I use the medium of photography because I believe the act of photographing, as well as the resulting images, fundamentally shift the perspectival, temperamental, and psychological position one holds toward the world. In tandem with this medium, I employ a methodology in which I turn to my local surroundings for the subject matter of my work, restricting the range of my artistic exploration to the places I occupy every day. If I am unwilling to find value in this location, I will be unable to find value in any location. My use of photography allows my viewers and myself to rediscover everyday environments through a monumental alteration of perceptual normativity.
My current body of work, These Inadvertent Marks, is a photographic investigation of scuffs, stains, bruises, residue, scratches, holes, and blemishes. These marks are byproducts of human intention. I consider those marks that are largely deemed trivial and peripheral as a means of challenging ordinary value systems and surrendering to the unconsidered. I make these photographs as I wander: a process of discovery and close consideration of urban streets, private homes, airports, bathrooms, alleys, and storefronts. This artistic and theoretical inquiry revolves around themes of the semiotic, autonomous, contingent, and meaningful status of these marks; it asks questions of the constitution of signs, establishment of meaning, excess of intentions, and interpretive instability. Through an investigation of these inadvertent marks, I look to highlight the uncontrollable flux, turbulent drift, and recalcitrant shifting of the status of meaning.
I hope that those who view my work would slow down; to question the very structure by which we are able to move through the world at such great speeds; to pause and consider the things which we have chosen to ignore through our hierarchies of value and utility, things that have plenty to say but to which we have kept our ears shut and eyes closed.