Photograpy Based Works

2018-2019

wood board, acrylic, silk, tissue, paper, wax

4 x 4” each panel

Following the ideas of a quilting, these works are pieced together from different people and played out in a grid to mimic a quilt top each work is part of a whole. These works came out of exploring the ideas of people being parts of other people they have known or know, the power of inherited memories, and the idea that people we do not yet know will play a part in who we are. Mixing portraits of strangers and family members, mixing genders, and races together each work creates a new stranger we have yet to meet. We are all strangers when we meet and yet if we open up to each other we can find overlap with each other.

2018

Found Photographs, Acrylic, and Ink on Board

“Horse feathers” is an idiom referring to made up nonsense. It is also used as a substitute for cursing in calling something out as untrue or false. In looking at what is considered fact or fiction, it should be realized that most things seen as fact are able to be manipulated to the benefit of those using them. While it is human nature to put things in clear categories with labels, may be best to consider that not everything can be defined so clearly and might not need to be.

-This work is made up of photographs collected across the US, Britain, and Holland; all include images of horses. The central painting is copied from a scientific anatomical horse etching from the 1820s.

2018

Found Photographs on Board

White feathers have a long history of being symbols of cowardliness. During World War I, suffragettes in Britain pinned white feathers to the chests of men who remained at home to call them cowards. The individual choice to go to war or not has many layers. Conventions of masculinity, obligations to a nation of one’s citizenship or birth, the role and expendability of an individual for a larger cause, and the long term implication of warfare on soldiers and civilians. All these reasonings, it can be argued, are simultaneously cowardly and courageous. The shades of grey/gray in these mostly black and white photographs speak to the just and unjust nature of war and military service.

-This work is made of photographs with men and women in military uniform acquired in the US, Britain, and Europe. They are from conflicts spanning WWI to Vietnam, and include soldiers from both sides of some conflicts.

2018

Found Photographs and Paper on Board

The wingspan of the MQ-9 Reaper, an unmanned offensive strike drone, is 66 feet. Mostly piloted out of Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, they are predominantly used in attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Questions have arisen over how enemy combatants and civilians are identified and defined, and how precise the ‘targeted attacks’ actually are. In April of 2011, the Los Angeles Times released the transcript from a February 21, 2010 event where a U.S. crew spread across Utah, Florida, and within Afghanistan tried, over a four hour span of time, to determine if they could identify weapons and/or children within a convoy of vehicles in Afghanistan. The transcript is both long and laborious to read, but it is a four hour conversation to determine life or death based on identifying objects and people though grainy imagery and crackly radio air.

-This work is made of photographs taken from or showing airplanes.

2018-2019

Found Photographs and Pins

Physical photographs are often considered ephemera, paper records of events and/or of people. Feathers also carry a sense of ephemera. In the not so distant past, rolls of 12 to 36 frame film were used selectively to capture moments we did not want to forget, yet many prints end up in junk and antique stores, where their context becomes lost.

-This work is made of found photographs collected across the US and Britain.

2014

wood, acrylic paint, cotton thread, sea glass, glass bottle, found photograph, found sari, transfer letters

6.5 x 6.5 x 2” framed