Memories of Clouds Past

Each of these images consists of a cloud digitally constructed by the artist from another person’s hand-drawn sketch. Drawn from each participant’s mental image of a cloud rather than as documentation of any particular cloud, then digitally produced as photographic images, these clouds are confabulations, composite memories derived from the imagination. Each image, then, presents a kind of false documentation, the photographic evidence of a memory that never actually existed.

The Contortionists

Inspired by the bodily flexibility of circus contortionists, this series depicts figures whose bodily modifications register psychological, emotional, and social conditions not normally visible within immediate physical reality. The elongated limbs, half-buried figures, and punctured flesh of the family members within these photographs become signs of awkwardness, objectification, and attachment written onto the body. Through these exaggerations, these images offer a window onto states of being that lurk invisibly within conventional snapshot photography.

Reconstructing Nature

These images reshape and exaggerate the natural phenomena commonly documented in vacation photography. In doing so, they present the experience of travel and vacation as it is remembered rather than as it is lived—a sort of idealized revisitation through photographs, as the images’ subtitles suggest. Taken as a whole, the series functions as a distortion of the classic American vacation slideshow, where the failure of photographs to live up to memory is inverted, producing dramatic landscapes of visualized memory.

Still

This series explores the temporal paradox of stillness as a state in which the past and the future are both present in the literal and figurative senses of the word, coexisting within a single moment. Each image consists of the same body from multiple temporalities reverberating within one space, troubling the linear notion of how a body grows and develops over time.

Mother/Me

This autobiographical series consists of manipulated family photographs taken from birth to adulthood, replacing the image of a mother’s body in each photograph with an image of her child from the present moment. The resulting effect is an uncanny doubling across time, in which present and past moments are wrenched from their positions in time and compressed together. These images depict mothering in an endlessly recursive loop, raising questions of reproduction, embodiment, and genealogy.

Timescape

This piece combines photographs of a single space—a small-town backyard—taken over 50 years. Seamlessly integrating partial images into a larger whole, Timescape functions as sort of temporal collage, mixing time through photographic material in a manner that imagines a complexly layered history within this space.

My father died four years ago

This series addresses the ways in which photographs become ineffective over time, losing their connection to the people and events they document. In order to explore this effect, these images provide a photographic biography of a deceased father by removing him from family photographs and filling in the background behind where he originally was. He becomes visible in new ways through this overwriting, present in the gestures, poses, and expressions of the people around him. These paradoxical portraits testify to both our cultural attachment to snapshot photographs and the limitations and distortions they impose on our memories.

Design + Writing

Coming soon.

Student Work

Interactive & Animation

Selected student work from Interactive Animation, Digital Animation & The New Media Project

Design (web + print)

Selected student work from Web Design I, Web Design II, Web Design III, Graphic Design II, Senior Portfolio & Typography I

Digital Imaging & Photography

Selected student work from Photography I, Photography II, Photography III, Introduction to Computer Art

Student Work [interactive/photography/design]