Artist Statement
My approach to photographic art-making is a synthesis of the many aesthetic styles
and practices I have studied from my teenage years to now. In the beginning,
captivated by the altered reality of extended time exposure and color, I seized upon
the use of long exposures for soft and dreamlike prints that I then hand-tinted. I
celebrated motion as an energy field of rippling wavelengths. My interest in mixing
media and layering the photographic surface next led to combining shadow figures
in the darkroom, adding text, applying collage and image transfer. Rather than
create a single photographic statement, I started to shape multiple photographs into
larger sized works. For example, in Initiation, photos of contemporary women
expand borders as diptych and triptych and meld into female images from ancient
Dionysian Mystery cults. Likewise, in Homeboy, a documentary sponsored by a
neighborhood theatre company, I displayed a hundred and fifty black and white
slides using a dissolve unit and two projectors joined by a performance of a scared-
straight poem, “Letter in Lady Day Spring Tones,” delivered by Brooklyn ex-
convicts. In Hope, I printed out the fourteen dictionary definitions of the word and
clustered portrait and landscape photographs around each. Finally, in my most
recent project, Walking Underwater, I return to my earliest phase of photo-making.
Using varied time exposures and color film, I once again document the female
figure. However, now her form is submerged in clear blue swimming pools with
unpredictable results.
and practices I have studied from my teenage years to now. In the beginning,
captivated by the altered reality of extended time exposure and color, I seized upon
the use of long exposures for soft and dreamlike prints that I then hand-tinted. I
celebrated motion as an energy field of rippling wavelengths. My interest in mixing
media and layering the photographic surface next led to combining shadow figures
in the darkroom, adding text, applying collage and image transfer. Rather than
create a single photographic statement, I started to shape multiple photographs into
larger sized works. For example, in Initiation, photos of contemporary women
expand borders as diptych and triptych and meld into female images from ancient
Dionysian Mystery cults. Likewise, in Homeboy, a documentary sponsored by a
neighborhood theatre company, I displayed a hundred and fifty black and white
slides using a dissolve unit and two projectors joined by a performance of a scared-
straight poem, “Letter in Lady Day Spring Tones,” delivered by Brooklyn ex-
convicts. In Hope, I printed out the fourteen dictionary definitions of the word and
clustered portrait and landscape photographs around each. Finally, in my most
recent project, Walking Underwater, I return to my earliest phase of photo-making.
Using varied time exposures and color film, I once again document the female
figure. However, now her form is submerged in clear blue swimming pools with
unpredictable results.
