REPRESENTATIONS, 2001-2008

My series of photographs, Representations, explores the concept of photographic truth and its correspondence to perceived reality. As a kind of playful homage to William Henry Fox Talbot’s treatise, The Pencil of Nature, the images combine color photography and drawing to create what I like to call photographic documents of three-dimensional drawings. I start by collecting everyday objects from the recent past—things made obsolete by technological changes and time; I then whitewash them with ordinary house paint as a method of erasure, and then draw directly onto their surfaces with charcoal to create visual hybrids that appear to vacillate between drawing and photography, black-and-white and color, signifier and signified, copy and original. No digital manipulation is involved, but the camera’s monocular point of view is imperative.

In stark contrast to Cubism’s confluence of perspectives, Representations exploits the limitations of a singular point of view to construct a photographic document, pointing to the incomplete and illusory nature of any representation. In an age of artifice and surface appeal, how do we determine what is a truth or lie, fact or fiction, personal choice or manipulated desire? How often do we base our reality on mistaken or false beliefs—or memories on family pictures or newspaper photos? My work exploits a system of signs and symbols drawn from a consumer culture to consider the influence of visual conventions upon our perceptual expectations. How does our need to categorize, label and compartmentalize limit or expand experience? These photographs—characterized by monochromatic color, singular objects, flat lighting and simple outlines defining form—deny the viewer's usual expectations and question the generally accepted identity of photography.

By challenging various assumptions about what is or makes a photograph. I’m interested in identifying the concepts and tendencies that often define, influence and limit the direction of the medium as an art form. Ultimately my goal is to contribute to the conceptual, aesthetic and experiential possibilities, and reexamine its role in representing and shaping the human condition, and navigating our relationship to the world we live in.