* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
This particular set of work is meant to explore the complexities and acute subtleties found within the experience of bourgeois life. The photographs investigate how the violence inherent in the act of inhabiting certain social spaces manifests itself in the everyday moment – in our sexuality, ideas, spaces and experiences. The work examines how the desires that exist in our personal lives relate to the desires of the totality.
As a young American artist I feel a responsibility to react to the political and social spaces that I am complicit in. I believe that my role is to question and complicate the connections between the personal and the political. Art is a vehicle through which we can question and rethink the structures and systems which occupy our everyday lives. Through my work I hope to decenter meaning and interrogate our assumptions about society and culture.
My work is intended to contain a narrative quality, one without a clear chronology but rather a deliberate open-endedness, one which invites the viewer to imagine the situation in a variety of different ways. By looking through the lens of the everyday moment and studying the suburban landscape, the work allows us to rethink established and rigid social orders within our culture and create spaces for new meaning and identities to exist. The text placed in the work complicates this rethinking, by presenting a variety of frameworks with which to approach the rest of the visual content. The space between the meaning of the text and the various subjects in the photographs is where the conflict occurs. It is at this specific site that we experience the dissonance and violence present in each piece, and it is where we can find and produce ideas about the work itself.
