Artist Statement

The more time I spend with photography the more my views on it change. I came to the practice like most, fascinated by its ability to document the world in tiny pictures, as it became an extension of my eye that allowed me to discover meaning in images. Eventually I broke away from conventional modes of representation in search of innovation, and ultimately became intrigued by photography’s capacity to transport my ideas into art. As I began to sound my own voice, I also began to believe in photography as a vehicle for criticality and intellectual discourse.

I began taking pictures in a documentary style that privileged subject over photographer. Eventually, I adopted a more critical approach that acknowledges the indeterminacy of meaning and welcomes multiple interpretations. When Kansas City Star art critic Robin Trafton remarked on my work, "Watery eyes, slightly irritated from the dust, evoke Roman marble busts just come to life," I learned something from this unexpected interpretation. As I continue mining my own experiences as subject matter for art, I discover ideas like gems I want to explore in images. If some artists draw their inspiration from nature, my inspiration comes predominantly from culture, fostering images that reference the vast and complicated territory of uncertainty that lies between nations, regions and cultures. Through an exploration of these ideas from local, national and global perspectives, I feed my own natural curiosity about culture, and its requisite counterpoint, cultural divide.

My first experiences navigating the territory of cultural divide began when I moved from New York City, where I was born and raised, to Los Angeles, where I would spend the next dozen or so years of my life. For an 11-year-old city kid from New York, this eight day trip across the continent with my family was an adventure filled with excitement, and uncertainty. It also became a social predicament, as I became keenly aware of the cultural divide between the American East and West, even if at the time I remained largely unaware of how deeply it would affect me until later in life when I began mining these experiences as resource material for art. Ultimately, I came to identify with the West Coast as my home, taking on many of the attributes of a society I at first misunderstood, and finding that many of my assumptions had in fact been misconceptions.

Looking back, one of the things that intrigues me still, is how my attitudes changed over time. This left me wondering about my beliefs in the first place, and ultimately set me on a path toward questioning Truth itself as I understood it. My background, education and experiences in other areas of life further informed my thinking, and I began to see my own values as deeply engrained social myths. Later, as I investigated these topics further, they emerged as social constructions, systematically handed to me by my culture, not necessarily rooted in fact, but in the prevailing ethos of the day. And so, with one eye aimed at challenging my own assumptions about art and life, and the other aimed at broadening my changing perspectives on society, I began chasing some of these ideas in my work.

What began as a personal predicament became a fascination with the social landscape in a larger sense that has led to projects in Canada, the U.S., and abroad. My subjects are my collaborators, my neighbors, my friends. They join with me in a creative process that unfolds pictures, sometimes critical, sometimes playful, often satirical. If at the extremes these images represent both the individual and society, in between lie pathways that lead me deeper into the complex matrix of culture, with the intention of challenging my own socially constructed assumptions about it.