Artist Statement
Concrete

For me photography is an exciting discipline, a discipline born of experimentation and human desire. Photography is the point where I begin my practice but not where my practice ends. My desire to engage something beyond what the photograph can materially represent is directly linked to the history of the medium and the psychological origins of how we see. A rewarding and engaging discipline but a discipline that has a fixed number of moves and positions. A discipline of diminishing returns that can only extend your thinking to the discipline's limit. But the limit is engaging. At the limit of photography you can not know more but sense that some non-linguistic 'magic' (the unknowable) is occurring. Magic is my interest in photography. The photographic medium contains magic but the medium itself can not communicate what that magic is. An expanded artistic practice has the potential to do so.

Abstract

Looking is a problematic activity.  It is impossible for me to say that I look only with my own eyes.  Also impossible to say that if I looked with only my own eyes I would see clearly. My eyes are structured both from within and from without. From within by my reference points, shared visual language and learned responses.  From without by an aesthetic rendering of the psychology of the present.  But I desire to see clearly. My art production is a means towards seeing clearly.  Art production is an engagement of choices and positioning. A serious engagement, with rights and wrongs.  How do I exist outside binary hierarchies. I am told where to look by dominant modes of representation (social, political, ideological, and personal). Through my artistic practice, as I make material and conceptual choices, I shift, to a position within but not fully determined by the
dominant structures. To enact this shift I must destabilize myself.  The question becomes how to work with myself and against myself simultaneously.  I am determined by the dominant modes but also contain the potential to gain distance from myself, to examine myself, my material and conceptual choices, and my artistic position reflexively.  I may not look clearly
with my own eyes but I try to see my own eyes clearly.