SOME BLOWS ARE HEAVY

This work focuses on the tension between the visible and invisible, the things we see and those that we willfully discard. These unique works often depict scenes that are painful to process, creating an internal struggle for the viewer who is at once transfixed and wants to turn away.

This innate contradiction is embraced and present in the images. Layering techniques and a language of obfuscation and blurred vision are deftly employed so the subject matter can be encountered slowly, each moment unfurling as new perceptions and realizations emerge. The viewer sees a model of experience and is able to contemplate a world on a different register than the one in which they stand.

I start with one of my photographs and then complicate the surface. The photograph acts as the substrate for the ink and resin that I apply by hand in cumulative layers over time. The resulting mediated images examine the vulnerabilities we all carry. I’m uncovering something, like in an archeological investigation, to make a different kind of sense of it. Because life is way more complex than one moment captured by pressing a shutter; more complex than one objective truth.

It’s my intention that the surface presents a physical choreography combining the documentary and the handmade in a way that invites close examination. I’m illuminating certain things for the viewer, and obscuring others. My hand—not merely my camera—is making the piece, and I’m directing your attention toward certain areas of the photograph that I find most intriguing. The visibility of my manipulations alerts you that you’re now sharing in my deeply subjective gaze.

As we traverse the picture, energy builds and swells, merging opposing moments: of the sublime and of peril, beauty and horror, excitement and fright, never letting go of either sensation. You are looking at this image—and, for a moment, at the world—through my eyes.