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▶︎ These Inadvertent Marks, is a photographic investigation of scuffs, stains, bruises, residue, scratches, holes, and blemishes. These marks are byproducts of human intention. I consider those marks that are largely deemed trivial and peripheral as a means of challenging ordinary value systems and surrendering to the unconsidered. I make these photographs as I wander: a process of discovery and close consideration of urban streets, private homes, airports, bathrooms, alleys, and storefronts. This artistic and theoretical inquiry considers the possibility for these marks to be read as meaningful texts and viewed as beautiful objects, despite their lack of design and authorial intention; it asks questions of the constitution of signs, establishment of meaning, excess of intentions, and interpretive instability. Through an investigation of these inadvertent marks, I look to highlight the uncontrollable flux, turbulent drift, and recalcitrant shifting of the status of meaning.
▶︎ I use the medium of photography because I believe the act of photographing, as well as the resulting images, fundamentally shift the perspectival, temperamental, and psychological position one holds toward the world. Thus, my use of photography offers an opportunity to rediscover everyday environments through a monumental alteration of perceptual normativity. I hope that those who view my work would slow down; to question the very structure by which we are able to move through the world at such great speeds; to pause and consider the things which we have chosen to ignore through our hierarchies of value and utility, things that have plenty to say but to which we have kept our ears shut and eyes closed.

▶︎ I am searching for a way to grieve someone I never knew. At age 26, I was lucky enough to meet the woman who would become my wife. We quickly discovered that there were many coincidences and connections that could be found when we examined our lives a little more closely – our parents shared a wedding anniversary, our fathers each had five siblings, Alice’s parents shared their names with my grandfather and his second wife (Walter and Joan). But what quickly became apparent to me were the links between Alice’s mother and my grandmother. Apart from photographs and memories shared by those who knew them, I would never know them. Both lives ended tragically young. Both died from genetic diseases.
▶︎ Photographing, for me, is to write a metaphor. There are things unphotographable – how do you create an image of someone who died a quarter of a century ago, a person you have never known? In varying sizes and at varying heights, my photographs act as constellations within which relationships begin to form independently of the connections that I draw between them.
▶︎ By searching for visual pleasures in the world around me using multiple formats of photography, I make visual the abstract histories that are known to me about Joan and Jean. Through examinations of heredity and meditation on coincidence and predetermination, I cling to what will inevitably be lost, trying to view grief not as something that passes, but something we are always in the midst of.

▶︎ A woman enters marriage, guided by a rich lineage of strong marriages, yet also caught in a web of misplaced ideals and expectations deferred by culture. She carries the weight of these histories, as well as her own expectations. When a woman realizes her marriage is not what it should be, that she has been turned into a flat and unfulfilled version of herself and ultimately files for divorce, the weight of all those expectations and her disappointment in her perceived failure practically crushes her.
▶︎ Using photography, installation, video, embroidery, and the creation of photographic objects (through embroidery and alternative process techniques), this work examines my own expectations upon entering marriage and my current values. The ideals and beliefs I once held dear about marriage and family disintegrated very shortly after entering my own marriage. I have struggled with the weight of having broken a lineage of lifelong, successful marriages. I am now trying to put the pieces back together of an identity I no longer recognize.
▶︎ How do we examine our ideals and histories after experiencing a related trauma? The Knots on the Underside of the Carpet looks to investigate my own life by revealing the knotted underbelly that we don’t usually see, and exposing the surface as a false veneer, a false image that we as a society have bought into, but of which we ultimately fall flat.