Artist Statement


My work focuses on the hidden, imaginary and delirious aspects of photography, taking a starting point from moments where representational logic fails and attempting to give these moments of illogic a representational form of their own. For me, the simplest and most compelling of such moments has always been the self-portrait -- a moment where one inevitably appears backwards to oneself, entering into a dialogue with both psychoanalytic angst and delirious possibility. In many ways, the photograph proves the illogic of the self -- and just as one's voice sounds inevitably foreign when played back on an answering machine, so too does it seem that self-image is always, in some way, as much an image of not-being (even an image of absence) as anything else.

I don't see this relationship limited to a dialogue of identity however -- instead forming one of the core concerns of the photographic medium itself. This might be conceptualized as a relationship between light and darkness, or knowledge and uncertainty, or lucidity and delirium, or vision and performance -- in each instance problematizing a strict documentary relationship by holding the image and its subject in tension with one another. For myself, this relationship quickly becomes paradoxical -- serving as a catalyst for the question of how one might then begin to re-conceptualize such tensions in more poetic or imaginative terms -- not as failed attempts at representation but rather as having (photographically) represented things differently, despite the illogic that might seem to result.

Each of my projects addresses this paradox in some way, attempting to re-tell the story of representation along somewhat different lines of thought -- attempting to “imagine the world otherwise” as the philosopher Richard Kearney once prescribed for a world grown overly attached to the literalness of instrumentalized living. In this way I see my work as a critical exploration of representation in the service of imaginary possibilities.