Artist Statement

My most current work depicts a spectacular American culture saturated with large-scale color imagery, consumerism, and forward momentum. The attractions featured in this series are both novel and commonplace, including parades, reenactments, fairs, and trade shows in ordinary communities around our country every day. Each event is transitory, challenging me to capture a single image before that scene is forever altered. Photographing multiple frames at each location allows me to draw out fragmented cinematic feeling narratives between the subjects and their environments by seamlessly compositing them together.

Defying conventional framing techniques, my photographs appear in large (40x50x12 inches), wooden, double-sided (one image on each side), freestanding light boxes. They strive to capture the attention of the fast-paced onlooker in our image-glutted world. Taken out of context and into a gallery setting, I encourage the viewers to experience the work from multiple perspectives. One has to bend, crouch, and circulate the work in order to see its entirety. This movement leads to the discovery that although the two images on either side are the same; one photograph is reversed, thus, horizontally resembling the effects of a mirror. The height restraints of the box are set to the level that spectators on the opposing sides have to face one another as they view the work. This shift from passive reception to active participation mimics the subjects in the photographs.