Artist Statement
Rooted in nostalgia and a longing for comfort, my practice examines the relations humans develop with everyday objects. Through the photographic lens, I explore what people collect, imbue with meaning, and come to define, in small part, how they move through the world. My work is usually close to home and matrilineal, involving objects collected by my grandmother, my mother and me. Examining the objects my family members have held dear to them is a way of understanding my family through these objects, it was a way of preserving, and of preconceived coping for future loss. Further, it is a way of examining how crafting a relationship with these objects changes their importance and role in ways foreign to their original purpose. They become signals of memory.
My work usually unfolds through digital photography that branches into video and sculptural installations. I start with collecting objects, discussing their importance then documenting them. This documentation is transformed through layers of technological manipulation, and software-based experimentation that degrades and shifts the documentation leaving only traces of the recognizable image behind. This inevitably leads to a level of abstraction that reflects on memory as a fleeting non-whole, a glimpse. This abstraction also appears painterly with gestural qualities marks and composition. This relationship between painting and photography is a subtext throughout my work.
The moment in my practice that I begin to digitally abstract is when I embrace the unexpected and unplanned. This digital abstraction not only speaks about the medium of photography in an unconventional manner, it also bears meaning upon the actual subjects or images depicted in each work. I want my works to sit in this juncture between conceptual research and medium based inquiry. I want these works to intrigue, to spark an interest through formal qualities, details and, harmonies. I want to confuse and have a moment of pause. And beyond, into the conceptual to maybe reflect on the digital image and the possibilities it contains.