PHOTO: My art practice has photography(analog) as its focal point. The process of using film as a medium has no immediacy. You repeat yourself often, reshoot, reprint, and edit incrementally- for every image. Although nothing about making work in the dark room is quick, the product is always worth it. This manner of making work has informed me as an artist as I delve into other mediums. Degradation, transformation, and translation are themes that all have ties to photography. Themes that first manifested through black and white analog photography. It is through these descriptors that we see the passage of time, the evolution of culture, and the importance of change and what it reveals to us about us. My work has gone beyond one medium and has moved into the three dimensional space. While I use a wide variety of mediums such as plaster, ink, and clay- my style and acknowledgement of movement and lines is ever present in my understanding of objects and comes from my relationship to film.
ENTRY TO OTHER MEDIUMS/THEMATIC/ ENTRY TO THE ABSTRACT: The tactile quality of film photography has melded into my work and is activated in my other mediums through texture, composition, color, and spacial awareness of the object(s). With photography you can’t help but be up against the line of realism. I have approached this truth by looking to degrade and change what that reality looks like. Changing materials forces the hand into the abstract. There is this push to explore themes and visual textures seen in my own photographs and elaborate on them. This process brings my work together for a focused take on my environment and on myself. I absorb the spaces in which I exist through distorting and abstracting the physical. There are so many details to be had from our many environments, and with the consumption and over saturation of imagery that occurs on a daily basis, we lose sight of these most intimate details.
CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT: I think often on how I am looking at and consuming art. Not only do I understand and explore what it means to create visual work, but I am also interested in the environments and cultural movements surrounding artists in time periods beyond my own. I firmly believe that it is through understanding spaces that were occupied before you, that we understand where we are now. I am a reflection of my environment and my environment is constantly reflected on me. The relationship between these two states in constant and continuing. The unending goal is to capture the space between these states, the lines and the details that constantly go unseen. I seek opportunities to see beyond myself. I often do that by seeing into others, collaborating outside of practices I am comfortable in, and understanding spaces occupied before me. I am constantly looking to be well informed of what it is I make and why and even for whom.