Artist Statement
The more time I spend with photography the more my views on it change. I came to the practice like so many others, 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 originality, and in the process became captivated by photography’s capacity to transport my ideas into visual art. As I began to sound my own artist voice, I began to believe in photography as a vehicle for creative discourse.
Documentary images that privileged subject matter over photographer dominated my early photographic output. Later, I adopted a more critical eye that acknowledges the indeterminacy of meaning and welcomes multiple interpretations. As I continue to mine my own social experiences as subject matter, I discover ideas like gems I want to explore in images. If some artists draw inspiration from nature, my inspiration comes predominantly from culture, fostering images that reflect the territory of uncertainty that lies between social groups, regions, nations and cultures. Through an exploration of these dynamics from local, national and global perspectives, I feed my own natural curiosity about culture, and its requisite counterpoint, cultural divide.
My first significant experience navigating this territory began when I moved with my family from New York City, where I was born and raised, to Los Angeles, where I would spend the next dozen years of my life. For an 11-year-old New York City kid, that eight day trip across the continent with my family was an adventure filled with excitement, if uncertainty. It also ultimately unfolded as 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. Eventually I came to identify with the west coast as my home, taking on untold attributes of a subculture I at first misunderstood, and finding that many of my assumptions had about it had in fact been misconceptions.
Looking back one of the things that intrigues me still, is how my attitudes imperceptibly changed over time. This left me wondering about my beliefs in the first place, and ultimately, set me on a course toward questioning truth itself as I understood it. My background, education and experiences in other areas informed my thinking further, and I began to see my own values and attitudes as deeply engrained social myths. Later, as I continued investigating these forces, they emerged as social constructions, systematically handed to me by 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 evolving 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. At the extremes these images represent both the individual and the group, while in between lie pathways that lead me deeper into the complex matrix of society, with the intention of challenging my own socially constructed assumptions about it.
