Artist Statement
I make photographs that examine the body’s ability to channel personal and social histories, drawing on the various formal and informal languages of the medium and its archival capabilities. I photograph friends, strangers, neighbors, and family using both large and small-format cameras alongside found photographs. Appropriated images come from a variety of sources, including local libraries, periodicals, and personal collections. The fragmented meta-narrative addresses themes of intimacy, familial legacies, community, sexuality, and injury. These conflicting motifs illustrate an evolving mythology.

The photo-based installation Assemblage [Image_1] consists of hundreds of 4 x 6 inch glossy photographs t-pinned to the corner section of a wall. The central corner functions as a spine, with the pictures branching out on both walls to form a “biological mass” of photographs. The majority of the photos are pulled from public archives while others are gathered from neighbors, friends, and strangers. The installation is representative of both public and institutional memory, private individual events, as well as my own consciousness. It includes images of rituals, family ceremonies, wars, colonialism, and popular culture. To illustrate examples of a few pictures included in the installation: Haile Selassie appealing to the League of Nations in 1936; Wacka Flocka’s underground hip-hop performance in 2009; anonymous Congo dancers; De Beers Diamond representatives at a ribbon-cutting ceremony; a Jesuit priest; Jack Johnson’s 1915 knockout in Cuba; anonymous baptisms, medical pictures, and ethnographic images; Diana Ross’s 1983 Central Park performance, La Cicciolina; and Aunt Karen’s garter belt removal at her wedding reception. As a whole, Assemblage is an expanded album that incorporates years of histories, truths, and myths. Assemblage is a visual regeneration of human histories and futures.

Addressing the more violent aspects of recent American history, Ohio Series [Images 15-17] consists of appropriated headshots of eleven women who were murdered by a serial killer in Cleveland, OH between 2008 and 2009. I re-photographed the images and printed them on newsprint paper. The non-archival quality of the newsprint material references the ephemeral nature of the subjects’ bodies and its circulation (or non-circulation) through news media. Missing Pretty Girl Syndrome [or Missing White Women Syndrome] is a vernacular term for the disproportionate degree of coverage in television, radio, newspaper and magazine reporting of a missing person case involving a young, attractive, white, middle-class woman compared with cases concerning persons of other ethnicities or economic classes. The eleven women killed in Ohio have not received widespread media coverage. However, the series is my own private and public gesture towards remembrance and validation of the body and the violence it sustained regardless of the boundaries of race and class.