My diverse practice, which includes photography, video and digital art explores the psychological concerns of the random encounter and probes the body’s ability to remember. Often engaged with a human subject, I make visible the uncertainty and doubt that we all carry in an age of instant replays and digital capture. What does remembering mean and how does the body remember? My fascination with this subject derives from watching my grandmother succumb to Alzheimer’s. In my last meeting with her, I was struck by her lack of recall, a traumatic experience, which led to my early forays into photography. The discipline of photography was the underpinning of my artistic evolution. Now, I engage with immortalizing my relationships and experiences through various forms of documentation. I consider my work archival and my role as an archivist. The formal and conceptual execution of this endeavor varies, yet remains in consistent dialogue with current developments in photography, video and their respective presentation. The accretion of this archive, events, records of events and subjects, has produced a vast and emotionally charged exploration into the concepts of immediacy, intimacy and duration.
Furthermore, my interest in memory deepened as I began incorporating video and computer based systems into my projects. This is evidenced in works such as Balloons, Umbrellas & Snow, and most recently 4000K. An essential part of my artistic vocabulary is the dating of the image. Dates became the physical markers for my records of memories and function to legitimate these moments as viable events that are worth remembering.
Born in Ohio, I relocated to New York City in 1997 to pursue my interests in photography, video, and installation. My commitment to capturing presence, whether as a sense of place, the passage of time, and/or the relationships between people, has led to my multimedia output. My practice is durational and also engaged with the archive. Of primary concern to me is negotiating uninterrupted concentration from both my viewers and subjects, which I do through expanding the formal and conceptual notions of portraiture. As our attention spans diminish due to the spatio-temporal dislocations of our era, the frenzied use of cell phones and social media, I aim to cultivate a moment with the sitter that lasts longer than a glance and can generate immersive and resonant experiences.
I have collaborated with notable contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince, Brice Marden, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, and Yoko Ono. My individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at the MoMA, The Kitchen, Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma, the Sundance Film Festival’s “New Frontier,” The Toronto International Film Festival, The Stockholm International Film Festival, The National Young Arts Foundation and the National Monument Fort Jay at Governors Island. I have been awarded grants from The National Young Arts Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. My residencies include The Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller estate and Marfa, Texas.