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Now You See Me, is an ongoing series of photography-based linocut self-portraits. The title alludes to
the familiar ending of the axiom, “now you don’t”— implying that while you see me… my body, my
experiences, and perspectives on my life, there are many parts of my existence that you don’t see in these
images. The storytelling aspect of my images illustrates only moments and pieces of my truth. The images are
about me, but they are also about a character I play. The character represents a man who inhabits constructed
spaces acting out the dramas and moments of reflection in everyday life. In this thesis, I intend to make a
connection between the indexicality of photography and the gestural aspects of printmaking. These two ways
of making images – photography and printmaking – are emblematic of the balance between reality and fiction
in my work. My prints seek to show visualizations of my own thoughts and feelings. By starting with a
photograph, I can capture my poses and surroundings in a realistic way, but by departing from the photograph
into drawing and printmaking, I can add or subtract from the original photograph, incorporating details and
quasi-surrealist imagery to enhance the impact of the images. Editing out personal details allows for clarity
and a deeper connection to the universal, harnessing the totality of human experience. The gestural
expectations and nature of drawing and printmaking add a fictional element to the reality of the photograph.
A drawing is always necessarily removed from whatever it represents. Even in a direct observational drawing,
the artist is a filter between reality and its interpretation. In these prints I am rooted in photographic reality
but adding my own interpretations and reveries through the addition of drawing and printmaking
I see the spectacle of society. Brady’s photographs of civil war battlefields haunt my mind as I
walk across the grounds of an American fort in Maryland, where history is performed by reenactors as though trapped in time.
As I photographed tourists performing for their own images at Niagara Falls, I question whether their digital keepsakes hold any value, a bad picture
becomes a forgotten experience, but a great experience should be remembered. In Times
Square, tourists stare at the billboards of New York advertising, thinking they’ve found the
beating heart of a city, when the local office workers just try to avoid it. Those same office
workers might be happy to go to a baseball game, but they’ll be focused on their laptops more
than the game, like the suits I found in box seats at Comerica Park. The structures of most
stadiums organize people like a mini city, each person in their place, at levels determined by
class. While everyone is free to walk Boston Common, only the privileged will get to look out on
it without stepping outside, divided by apartment walls and glass windows. Yet everyone comes
together to enjoy the fireworks show on New Year’s Eve, the dazzling lights and concussive
blasts remind them they’ve been alive for another year and ask what they’ll do in the next. My
photographs claim that it doesn’t really matter, the spectacle will still be there, in different
forms, in different colors, in different American Moments. Sometimes I wish I could just enjoy
the show...
I use filmmaking as a tool to alleviate suffering. During difficult times in my life I turned to the
camera as I am able to express myself freely without explanations or words. The camera acts as
a bridge between myself and others, allowing people to cross into the mind of the filmmaker.
I’ve titled my most recent film, Fulaing is a Gaelic word meaning to suffer. I use the Gaelic
language as a homage to my Irish heritage and for the preservation of the language itself. This
short experimental film was shot on Super 8 analog film and projected in the gallery. I use fulaing
to describe how I feel sometimes as a mother, filmmaker, and human struggling to survive in the
world today. Fulaing is a piece of my story told in a loose experimental style to express the
adversities that I have faced, and overcome, in my life
This work is centered on my experience as a woman, a survivor, a host. It acts as a
proof of my existence. My photographic images are drawn from stories, dreams, and
feelings about my own experiences and illustrate struggles that I and many women
face through their lives. I am interested in the complexity of being a woman biologically,
socially and historically.
My photographs are made with the wet-plate collodion technique, commonly used in
the late -19th century. The slow process of pouring the sticky, volatile, and flammable
emulsion, which records my experiences for centuries to come, allows me to embrace
my past gradually. As I carefully mix acid, alcohol and salt to let the molecules work
together to bring the latent images alive, I wonder about and consider my body as a
collection of cells that encompass my ancestral history and that also carry traces of my
children — dead and alive. For me, noble metals I use interpret and capture the
intrinsic value of a female body and soul.
In this thesis, I will introduce you to the Town of Fries and many of its characters. The
characters include me, some of the residents, and even the fog. We may find that the fog
obfuscates certain truths about small town life, and occasionally, represents the differences I
believe we have in this country. I will tell you stories about how the town was built from the
ground up at the turn of the twentieth century to use the natural resources in the area and to
exploit the tendency for wages to be lower in the Appalachian Mountains than in other parts of
the country. I will tell you the story of the Town of Fries through my photographs and narration.
You might even call it a performance. The story will provide a lesson in tolerance in a divided
age and may assist in lifting the veil of fog that is a metaphor for our society and culture.
MFA Photography and Integrated Media Thesis Menu (2013-2022)
Our entire lives we spend counting, counting up and counting down. The good things we count down to, and the bad things always seem insurmountable. When we are young, we think more is almost always better. As we get older in age and experience we begin to realize less is almost always more. Counting isn’t always about quantifying; it’s about identifying patterns. Counting is an attempt to find order or structure to gain understanding about the thing being counted.
The myelin sheath is the protective layer of the axons in the brain, similar to the insulated coating on electrical wires, and in MS the immune system breaks down this protective barrier. When myelin is lost, and the brain-blood barrier is broken, the axons can no longer effectively conduct signals, which will manifest as a variety of symptoms including physical and cognitive disability. After the demyelination occurs, the symptoms that are experienced might subside, but never be fully extinguished.
The possibility of loss, the inevitability of loss, and the uncertainty can be equally as powerful and life altering as the actual loss. According to Kübler-Ross, who introduced the hypothesis of the Five Stages of Grief, “The limbo of loss is in itself a loss to be mourned. Uncertainty can be an excruciating existence. It is the loss of life, going nowhere or going nowhere slowly without knowing if there will be a loss.
This has become the foundation of my work, the idea that the mind is distinctly different than the brain.
If I ever build a house I will make it very skinny and tall with all the rooms built on top of each other, strung together through each other’s dreams as we slept. What about the person on the bottom then? Who was holding me in their dreams? Maybe this is what it means to grow up, to care and to provide instead of to receive.
I grabbed the framed family photos and laid them flat on their backs, and carefully stacked one on top of the other till they made up a half-foot of thickness. Stepping on the frames I was conscious to keep my weight on the outside edges of the stack where it felt more secure.
With time enough to make one last move I followed Vitus to the path that careened down a dirt embankment and bottomed out in a small opening of trees. The forest floor was hidden by arching ferns rising as high as my waist. An old felled Douglas fir was there; having collapsed long ago it was now a nursery log. It was half hollowed out inside and I crumpled my body in its opening. Vitus wedged himself alongside me and curled up in the shape of a scallop. As consciousness began to slip away I was eased to know I’d wake here, happy to be held in the grace of this great nurturer of the forest.
Though I have no recollection of it, it took years for my mother to get me to willingly bathe. She recalls that, even as an infant bathing in the sink, I would scream to the top of my lungs - even harder at the prospect of getting my head wet to wash my hair.
It was the thought of deep water terrified me; the thought of what lies beneath - this trepidation of being pulled under, either trapped and unable to surface, or overcome by a creature where my vulnerable body, drifting in the vast sea, gave me no fighting chance. They could feel the pounding of my heart and the panic I struggled to contain for fear of giving myself away. It was the thought that my body could forever be lost in the lower depths, never to reemerge. I could never escape the feeling that this was...my fate.
This question of shared phobia has enveloped the deepest corners of my mind. As an artist, I choose to make work that is symbolic of my quest for reasoning behind my fear.
There are many who claim that innate fear exists, without any presence of personal history as a factor. These proclivities have been analyzed at great lengths for at least 50 years within the field of Ethology. Ethologists are particularly concerned with innate behavior, and believe that such behaviors are the result of genetics and in the way genes have been modified during evolution to deal with particular environments (Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Kramer)
Konrad Lorenz, often described as the ‘father of ethology,’ spoke about this V-shaped shadow as a releasing mechanism for an innate fear response. The same fear response is witnessed in apes, who are all congenitally frightened of snakes, one of the few innate animal-based fears to also be widely present in humans.
It is a grandiose notion, that my fears were ingrained into my brain from ancient genetic blueprints, passed down from generation to generation.
She paradoxically loved what she also feared, as do I.
I believe there is a soul and that it is energy manifested as light.
We are connected to the cosmos through the very calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood, which originated from stars that died billions of years ago. My belief is that the earthly body is separate from the soul and that our light energy returns to the cosmos. Energy will not cease to exist, as it cannot be destroyed according to Laws of Thermodynamics. Therefore, if the soul is light energy, then it does not disappear and is instead transformed.
Twenty-three years ago, my mother’s life was transformed by cancer. As I approach the same age of her departure, I am constantly aware of my own existence. This is why my investigation into the unknown is relevant and personal. I have no evidence for the human soul or the afterlife, as my research does not set out to prove this. Instead, my consciousness chooses to have faith in having a soul and this leads me into an artistic investigation of how I perceive the afterworld. With my light constructions, I do not seek to exploit this emotion; rather, I aim to provide a visual salve and to encourage my viewer to consider that after death, life will be unknown.
An analysis of 1980’s architectural aesthetic and a physical thesis portfolio of re-photographed folded paper abstractions of architecture in the Boston area.
Thesis dealing with nature, myths, magic, talismanic objects accompanied by a physical portfolio consisting of an outdoor installation in the Emerald Necklace featuring her giant moss-men made of objects and materials found in nature.
Thesis focused upon the concept of intimacy and its relationship to her professional work as a re-touching artist. This was supported by large scale photographs of only the actual re-touched elements of fashion model portraits and bodies.
A thesis that is a total interactive experience, different for every “reader” depending upon the links the “reader” elects to follow. A traditional thesis felt too static, whereas the Tumblr venue allowed her to create avenues for exploration through the use of hyperlinks; developing a sense of depth as the “reader” clicked, going deeper and deeper.
Thesis analyzing candidate’s personal psychosis and fear of blood and her exploration of using blood as a medium in artistic expression. Thesis was supported by a video illustrating short vignettes of her explorations.
A these that explored the relationships and differences between hand-made and industrial objects by mirroring the automatic repetition of a machine through the process of paper cutting and realization through lithography. Physical work were monumental paper abstractions graphically illustrating sound.
Thesis dealing with the dissection of family photographs through visual language, symbols, and performance of gender.
Thesis focused upon three generations of women within a single family and supported by large scale photographs of tableaus illustrating reconstructed domestic spaces. Writing dealt with the analysis of posing, and the way photography is used to represent the self and family.
Thesis written as an autobiography to document values instilled through childhood and realized in adult life. The thesis was supplemented with a video of the candidate’s work with Down Syndrome afflicted children and how her future career would be dedicated to a foundation dealing with this disease.
Thesis about the lives and existence of illegal aliens, living in building and room-sized communities and their sacrifices to pay off the fees for smuggling them into America and keeping their family healthy, educated, and hopeful. Physical work in the form of photographs of this life.
Thesis engaged in a representation of her life being judged by others for being an overweight young woman. The visual work supplemented the writing and consisted of video, music, and uncompromising mural sized self-portraits.
Thesis analyzing Wallace Steven’s poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. The thesis deconstructed the poem and then reconstructed it in the form of a journal to represent how the identical sentiments related to her present life. Physical work existed in the form of a video illustrating the relationships of words and images.
A thesis discussing non-representational forms of photography as an invitational bridge into a state of meditation. The physical work took the form of massive scaled photographic abstractions of natural objects, such as his child’s hair, or water, seen in a way to obstruct identification. These works were painted upon in the style of a Sumi calligrapher.
A written thesis telling the stories of her life growing up female in the strict Muslim culture of Iran and how those experiences shaped her future. A video illustrating one particular story enhanced the reader’s experience by bringing the story to life. This thesis was subsequently accepted and shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
This thesis considers the female as it is contested in American culture. The work speaks to the confusion of specific roles of woman, and the communication of contradictory views of femininity. The work and the manner in which it is shown translate the ugly encounters she experiences on a regular basis. Physical work consisted of short vignettes in video format.
Thesis exploring the immigrant experience in America through the memories, textures, and materials used by the people building a life for subsequent generations. Writing dealt with a narrative story-telling experience and physical work was realized by laminations of photographic images from family albums onto porcelain and ceramic materials. Techniques were learned while in an internship at Harvard University.
This thesis documented her search for knowledge about a southern aunt who was a pioneer in women being active in politics. The thesis was based on an envelope of pictures and newspaper clippings and was resolved in the thesis through paper constructions and video, with a strong concentration on sound.
This thesis documented the degeneration of sight of her sister’s boyfriend and his efforts to remain in a normal life in spite of his increasing loss of sight. The physical thesis work was in video form and featured vignettes such as all of his friends taking turns teaching him how to drive a car down a dark road in the winter.
Dedicated to a 19th c. path of investigation following Herschel’s Anthotype process, John made hundreds of combinations of food sources and chemistry and painted the solutions on papers exposed to UV light over time. The thesis included research into chemical additives to our food, the effect of UV rays on those solutions, and the nature of abstract expressionism and constructivist painting, the forms he created for his tests on paper.
A series of lengthy video vignettes in an installation that illustrated the state of a multi-year relationship in the midst of a decision to go forward. The written component supported the process and analysis of the video investigation.
This thesis involved a trinity of videos revolving around the visual perception and recognition of the human body in a state of suffering or sorrow. Research detailed the paintings and sculptures she felt were emotionally profound because of the ways in which artists such as Caravaggio, Picasso, Goya, and Kollwitz depicted grief and suffering through the physicality of the human figure. Videos illustrated the research and were in the subjective forms of shadows, as in the parable from Plato’s Cave.
This thesis focused on the parables, spirituality and theology of Zen Buddhism and that belief system’s impact upon him growing up in China, and his relationship with his grandmother who was a shaman. Visual components were photographic abstractions.
This thesis explored the aftermath of intimacy and was represented through a series of videos, photo-sculpture, and installation. Her work formed a language of clothing as it related to emotional connection of direct physical contact. She investigated the concept through repetition, mending, healing, repairing, and attaching. All alterations to an article of clothing displayed a psychological repurposing interaction and compromise between two bodies. The written component was formed via short stories and free verse poetry.
In a dissection of social media, its features and influences can often be misinterpreted as an assortment of symptoms associated with a variety of mental illnesses. The ability to rapidly change personas, and impulsively construct personalities, could be a description if Dissociative Identity Disorder or nothing more than editing pictures of yourself on a number of unrelated sites. My thesis project is a visual depiction of signs and aspects of mental illness interpreted by the unique etiquette, trends and algorithms of social media.
My thesis, 22 Poplar, is a partial collection of the many memories my childhood home inspired, and in a very real way, a thank you to the people here, and gone, who raised me in it. I am interested in how memories, old and new, personal and familial, coalesce to fill and define personal domestic spaces. My investigation questions how memories, and the events associated with them, are affected by the removal or change of a key component in that moment. My memories, of our home, and the objects within, are now the only things I have left of my grandfather. After he passed, could some part of his being have gone to the same elusive space where memories reside? Probably not, but I would like to think my interpretation of the faux colonial house on 22 Poplar Street will get me a little closer to wherever his beautiful spirit rests.
In collaboration with my mother, my thesis explores the complexities of communication within a mother-daughter relationship following the death of her husband… my father. Throughout our life together, my mom and i were able to talk about anything and everything without conditions. The traumatic death of my father completely altered our dynamic and we became strangers to each other. Unable to recognize the unique pain and loss that the other was experiencing, our ability to understand one another reached a point where spoken language failed. The only way for me to speak at this point was through the trust in my art and visual expression. Words were useless and so I turned to images. In our recent past, this created an even greater problem because my visual approach to telling the story of my suffering was even more incoherent to her than speech. I was forcing her to learn my side of the story, my truth. Children need to recognized by their parents and my mother’s resistance to that adjusted view of her adult daughter continues to be a constant battle for myself. It is a struggle being an artist and a daughter. She Knows Me Now is a test for us. Testing my responsibilities as her daughter, testing us both to not attack or point a finger of blame, and testing my responsibilities as an artist where telling my truths is my priority.
My work explores the evidence that contributed to my family’s dysfunction and ultimately its collapse, brought on by my stepfather’s own separate trauma and depression—complications that had been ingrained into his personality long before we entered his life. My images are constructions based the events that took place during the period that he and my mother were married, in which time I had gone from my mid-teens to my early twenties, and my sister from kindergarten into eighth grade. A photographic narrative allows me to select the memories that are crucial to my and my audience’s understanding of the events that took place; moments that of course were not photographed, as a family reserves the taking of pictures for times meant to be remembered and looked back upon. With the creation of these photographs, I am able to investigate my experience with a man whose role as as my father deteriorated as he was engulfed by his alcoholism and depression.
Growing up, I idolized everything Disney; Mickey Mouse was my god, The Sensational Six were my saints. Disney movies became my homilies and scriptures, they taught me life lessons and helped me imagine that I could be anything I wanted to be. My Lady of Guadalupe, Pocahontas, was my hero as a child and brought strength to me as an adult. She was the only Disney “Princess” I figured I could be due to our similar dark hair and complexion, which I eventually learned to appreciate. Because of her, I knew I was my own heroine princess who didn’t need a prince charming to save the day, I only needed to have faith and believe.
My work is interested in the idea and systems of belief as it occurs in my life and in the objects that represent my values and what I believe in. I am expressing my beliefs from the past, and the present. Each piece represents a time in my life, with reference to a foundation of the Mexican catholic faith I grew up with and have transformed from. I am interested in the connection that one has with faith, symbols and objects of value stemming from childhood memories and experiences testing faith. With time, all these elements look different and change meaning as we age.
Watching television has been part of my daily ritual since childhood. Every time it was turned on, I was able to enter into new worlds that were exotic compared to my house. Each story on the screen filled me with hope, inspired me with passion, and took me to a place where everything, no matter how terrible, seemed to have a purpose, an arc, and an end. These visual narratives birthed the idea of an equational life, one that seemed simple and mathematical. After I realized that life couldn’t be firmly calculated, I decided to invent my own alternative realities of which I could control through photography and video.
My primary interest is in self-construction, how identities and personalities are formed, how they manifest and shift, and the characterization of “self”. With my current work, I am utilizing the techniques of cinema and theater to construct a fictitious reality, that emulates the surface of a world that I have long-envied and idolized: Hollywood. The process of performing in my designed space is cathartic because, instead of being a passive spectator to someone else’s constructed narrative, I create my own and actively participate in it.
I am currently working on a 24 minute linear video titled ‘Susurrus’ that will be exhibited within the interactive installation ‘Lost In Thought.’ ‘Susurrus’ is a collage of moving imagery which I am calling a living collage mindscape. This projected video is central in the installation and will be introduced by 11 paced photographs titled ‘Framed,’ and accompanied by a resin sculpture titled ’60% water’. For the sake of this introduction to my work, I will concentrate on the video ‘Susurrus’ alone. A discussion about the other installation elements would disrupt their intended affects.
Art allows me to express unexplainable emotions and feelings I have never felt before. Meaning by emotions, for example, sadness and happiness have to co-exist to reveal each other’s existence and the value they have.I always had a hard time controlling my emotions. It may be because I’m a sensitive person; I feel my emotions in huge waves. Many incidences happened to me because my inability to express and control my emotions, Love, relationships, avoidance, jealousy, hatred, anger, and happiness, aresometimes hard for me to express this with words. But I am learning from these contradicting emotions like the light and the dark. After creating my art, I have discovered myself in the process of expressing emotion through art. And I learned to control myself. This is the way I protect myself. The only way to express my sensitive emotions that cannot be created in words because there’s no words for them. My language -I speak through my art.
When deciding to create my book, “Confined In My Skin,” I was distinctively thinking aboutcinema, and film reels in particular. The viewer experiences my book the way they would acinematic film, I am continuously manipulating the perception of the viewer. They see what theywant to see, then as they flip through the pages, they get a sense of something much darkerand deeper than their original intake of the work.
The main conceptual focus in this work is obsession, but it has become clear that my living definition of this word is different than the normal interpretation. This is not a project about how obsession can affect a person, and it’s not about obsession as a direct, generally temporary mental state in relation to a specific topic. It’s about how it affects me and the resulting compulsions that occur as a way to live with and control these fixations. It’s about how the obsession can be used and dealt with, but it’s not a solution. An obsession, though intense and consuming, can be finite and have a course. There is a difference between an obsession and an obsessive personality. A life defined by obsession cannot sustain itself with any sort of harmony unless an order is established. That necessity is where this project comes from; and to establish an order to something, you must sometimes first tear it apart.
I still desire to create a space to preserve and experience my past, only now these memories live outside of my mind in my art. This Way Through the Darkness stems from the Memory Box I created as an adolescent while mourning the loss of my mother. Looking at household surfaces has been my way of connecting to the memory of my mom, because these were the surfaces she touched every day, the same surfaces I have in my life today
In this work I confront the complexities of my Nana, Evelyn Beckett’s dementia, by fabricating the pieces that have gone missing. Within my Nana's mind, history and fiction collide, creating something strangely new, haunting and at times painfully beautiful. Ten years ago was now ten minutes ago. There were no seasons; the clocks stood still. My grandmother was both lost and reborn. Fragments of the person I used to know would come to me now and then, but she was no longer my Nana and there was no one to hold our familial history together.
I have found ways to escape the daunting task of everyday life. I can use photography to play. I am able to convert the seriousness of life to my own comedic circus. Roland Barth in Camera Lucida said it more eloquently than I when he wrote, “What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die, I shudder...over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is a catastrophe.” Because of this truth, I must play and create because it is all too serious. I can also transform these people, my family, into anyone I want when I am in control of the photograph.
Photography has been a narrative tool for my family. I did not have much of my own voice in the family narrative because my parents were the photographers. I picked up photography soon after I left China and started to live alone in the US. I became the executor behind the camera, recording my very own story. Even still, I still lose my sense of time here very often. The memories I have formed in America have never managed to dig themselves a deep hole in my mind.
I practice camera-less photography and assume the rights to these elemental processes in hopes of gaining a more grounded and intrinsic understanding of the landscapes I observe, interpret, and create. I’ve adopted this type of field work as a personal collection of visual-mappings of uninhabited environments. Field notes are composed of two components: descriptive information and the observer’s reflection about the study that is being conducted. Each print carries light, minerals, and contaminants of the water; literal recordings of the environment they took form in. Untidy records recalling weather conditions, time of day, and where on the bend they were made. They coalesce to form a portrait, a trace of the shifting identity of a riverbed.
In the last four years I have been acclimating, building, and modifying my life. Creating a new normal and reestablishing what it means to be me both physically and psychologically. Paralysis is the metaphorical-well of inspiration I draw upon to create my images, sculptures and studio working environment. I utilize my paralysis as both coping mechanism and visual source, documenting and interpreting my body’s devastation within the fine lines of reality and fabrication.
To the Garden and Backconsists of four distinct series—The Perennial Garden, Floating Petals, Tucked into the Garden Bed, and Visitor—and a video piece called In Her Garden, through which I have examined from all sides my longing for the impossible return to innocence, obsession with preservation, and my present-day “gardens.”
I’ve stared into the eyes of murderers and abusers. I’ve studied and documented the masterful kinesics of great athletes, influential politicians, and infamous public figures. Through my lens, I’ve captured victories and tragedies. I’ve documented the literal forces of nature. I’ve talked to thousands of strangers, tapping on shoulders, stopping people in the streets, and knocking on doors...all for the chance to tell their story through photographs.
The Sun is a series of works that touch on ideology and its relationship to social context, gaze, and subconsciousness, represented by various media. Ideology for me is nothing but a framework, and it requires the context of media to deliver the meaning. Humans have countless ways to explain an idea, like in China, there are multiple words to define snow, or rain, and each method of expression, each medium corresponds to a different kind of cultural interpretation: superficial or cognitive, conscious or unconscious, temporary or permanent, literal or connotative.
This thesis will explore the idea of place by trying to un-derstand what a small spit of land in Narragansett Bay called Chepi-wanoxet was before colonial ownership. After visiting the area countless times with and without a camera, I am, in collab-oration with the island and the sea around it, attempting to make drawings and light-markings, using organic and light-sensitive materials, and imperfection to show its essence and its meaning to me.
I have made a series of photographic and video works using "isolation" as the theme. From my initial project “HOME,” completed in Shanghai in 2018 and 2019, to my recent project, “My Fear Journal,” made in Boston this past year. This past year, my intention was to illustrate to the viewer not the state of my loneliness, but the process of my thinking, reflecting on isolation.
In Seeing is Believing, Looking is Loving, I shall discuss the internal complexities of being able to relate and empathize with others and how photography acts as a vehicle for me to be able to do these things. Here you will be introduced to I (Want To) Love You, a body of images that I have pulled from my personal catalogs of people that I choose to commit myself to.
My thesis, titled In This Home, is about documenting experiences with my family that are reshaped by the passage of time and the evolution of technology, while navigating my conflicting ethical responsibilities to my art and to my family amidst a world of digital obsession. Sharing my art with a wider audience for the first time, this body of work investigates the layers of emotion within the family home, exploring the intricacies of loving one’s family unconditionally.
My move to New England was a complete 180 from what I had known in Florida. Once settled, I explored my new neighborhood and started photographing its characteristics, searching for ways I could connect both as a person and a photographer. There were days that I wished I could go back to Florida and experience that environment once more. Here in Cambridge I once again felt like an outsider, wondering if this was just another temporary place for me. I still don’t know. My images simultaneously represent my comfort and discomfort to where I am; to where I hope to belong. My desire for “home” is strong. It’s difficult to put down roots in shifting soil.
Homing Instinct is an exploration of walking and the physicality of film photography as it mirrors a poetic and visceral connection to the land. An ephemerality lingers within the work–a longing to experience and hold on as larger forces cause land and home to change forms. The work holds space for lightness but also defies it through an ominous representation of the cycles of loss within nature. I am especially drawn to the birds that live between land and sky, between rooted experience and unmoored wonder. I have a yearning to understand what it is like to be a bird, and a simultaneous acceptance of knowing that I never will. There is both a separation and a closeness between us. I do not pretend to understand why, but the observed experience of a bird feels wildly linked to my own returning to the marsh.
I began this thesis as a journey to find myself and to piece together evidence of the spirit world in my photographs to show my mom. I soon realized that it would probably be impossible to make a photograph of an actual ghost and subsequently turned my focus up on the mysteries found in my secular and manageable world. Photography has become my way to express myself and to communicate with the world.
The Outpouring is the title of this document that moves between memoir and musing, examining how I came to understand photography as a mediator between inner and outer life as well as how my process has developed and deepened over the last two years. Two artist books are connected to the written document: For an Anxious Mind (2021) and The Light Here and Elsewhere (2022), each is a vessel for communicating a particular feeling or an experience. The Outpouring discusses the organizing principles of each work, what led to their conception and the artists who have helped me locate my work in a larger context.
Dramatizing what I have experienced allows me to turn my ordinary experience into a more interesting story. In this way I use my own personal life as a basis for my films. Snap Out of It and Mary were two short films I made in 2021 and 2022. These films are about ordinary people’s stories, and they are both created based on my personal life experience. We are all born ordinary, but we all have the potential to experience extraordinary lives.
Through my projects, I am searching for a way to visually communicate a moment experienced in time through what it brings to light: a face, a tear, the physical act of leaving an impression or sharing an emotional gesture. I use photography as a way to connect and communicate a lived experience and to visualize bodily intimacies. In my images I like to wonder, imagine, and question what I am looking at — what I know and do not know. It is within the dark realities of a chaotic world that I, as an artist, feel compelled to respond with marks that carry meaning within them. In the two projects that follow, Haptic a nd Tears, I use a 20th-century photographic technique to focus on touch and contact, to convey meaning at the level of physical operation.
As of right now, photography has been in my life for more than half the years I have lived on this planet. It has moved with me, and sometimes in spite of me, marking creative growth, existential frustration along with the very specific idiosyncrasies that I now realize are the traits that define me as an artist. In conjunction with this medium that I have chosen as a method of explanation and expression is this other entity, a need for extremes of varying intensities that I have come to realize is the driving force behind a lot of the subjects I choose. These intense experiences have broken down my existence in complex ways, making me feel like someone who is in a constant state of repair or rebuilding. Lifelong Obsession With Oblivion started out as the calculated detonation of my life in order to review it. From this exploded view the work mutated, from the very literal physical form to the figurative forensic symbolic investigation. Lifelong Obsession With Oblivion is a photographic survey about surrendering, about giving into something that completely consumes you to the point of complete, wonderful, beautiful deconstruction.
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