The Uncertainty of Being

As an adoptee, I understand and experience the world in terms of incomplete information, or what is not known. I am interested in the multiple tensions inherent in this uncertainty: longing and disconnection, curiosity and anxiety, and the resulting thwarted resolution. In many ways it makes sense that I have chosen photography as my artistic medium because there is a relationship between the slipperiness of perception and how I experience the world. A photograph can give the impression of truth and be enigmatic at the same time.

This body of work, The Uncertainty of Being, investigates looking for something that is both ambiguous and specific and always a little out of reach. These photographs were shot in cities, places teeming with people in spaces of visual assault. People are together and alone, seen and unknowable.  In shooting this work, I relaxed conventions and intentions and in the process found myself making these cryptic and unsettling non-narrative visual experiences. They exist on the edge between abstraction and figuration, dreams and reality, and knowing and not knowing. This is the emotional landscape familiar to me—a puzzling place where people are, for the most part, unknowable. With this work, I am challenging the viewer to unravel meaning and also impeding them from doing it. I am asking them to contend with the uncertainty of being.

Things Fall Apart

The images in Things Fall Apart show the entropy in the current cultural landscape through depictions of the ordinary seen in an unexpected way. A tree is a bizarre entryway. An old carpet is the cosmos and a sparse room is an unfinished story. These are the things I notice— humorous relationships, visual inconsistencies, the mundane and the weird. The combination of pathos and humor in the work is complementary and actually gives us a glimmer of hope.

Stranger Things

The photographs in Stranger Things challenge perceptions while exploring the absurdity of human experience. The subject matter is strange and sometimes humorous, and presents itself in a weirdly self-important way. Subjects are depicted out of context. There are irrational juxtapositions and ambiguous spatial relationships. It requires work to understand what is being seen, and once grasped there is still a residual of ambiguity, breaking our paradigms of how the world should be and calling into question the truth of the image.