Artist's Statement
Departing from the use of the camera as a factual recording device, I create photographs with a lens I constructed from cast-off glass elements. This lens, a combination of disparate components, distorts light and perspective. It serves as a tool that allows me to access a different type of reality and to see visible light in a way unaided eyes cannot – much like the Hubble and Webb deep space telescopes capture gamma and X-rays to bring us otherwise imperceptible images of the universe. The specific objects being photographed are not the point of the images, and thus are not revealed or mentioned. The focus lies in what is found: images that are akin to the creation of galaxies, the destruction of stars, and other holy transformations of light and matter. However, because my work has been shot with a camera, it still remains rooted in physical phenomena that actually existed in front of the lens. This creates a tentative line back to the experienced world – a thread that can be followed from the abstraction presented in the imagery back to lived reality.
As a whole this work is about disparate parts fusing and falling apart again, things arriving and departing over and over--internally, externally, personally, cosmically, psychically. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, but it constantly changes. Bold and bright shapes cut through the darkness, only to give way to small specks of light in the void. Coalescing, disintegrating, and coming together, everything is continuously brand new but consistently made of the same material as before.
