I am a New York–based visual artist whose work has always been inseparable from my inner life. For much of my life I have lived with periods of profound depression, loneliness, anxiety, and a persistent sense of alienation. Art became a way of giving those experiences a physical form—a means of examining the distance between the world as it is and the world as we imagine, remember, fear, or wish it to be.
Photography has been the foundation of my practice, but I have never been particularly interested in defining myself by a medium. A camera, a painted photograph, a moving image, a few lines of text, or a deliberately absurd meme can serve the same purpose if it communicates the idea. The medium changes; the underlying preoccupations remain remarkably consistent: isolation, memory, desire, mortality, humor, disappointment, and the strange ways human beings search for meaning and connection.
My influences range from Duane Michals' narrative photography and Man Ray's surrealism to René Magritte's disruption of ordinary reality and Lou Reed's ability to find poetry in loneliness, contradiction, and everyday life. I am drawn to work that can be melancholy without becoming sentimental, serious without losing its sense of humor, and personal without requiring an explanation.
Over time my practice has expanded from traditional photography into hand-painted photographs, digital collage, video, animation, text, poetry, and other forms. I don't regard these as separate bodies of work so much as different languages for pursuing the same questions.
Why do we remember what we remember? Why do we want what we cannot have? How much of another person exists only in our imagination? And how do we create meaning in a life that does not necessarily provide it for us?
My work has been exhibited internationally and is held in the permanent collections of The Center for Fine Art Photography and Benedictine University.