Artist Statement

I was born in rural Louisiana and my stepfather’s work brought my family to Jakarta, Indonesia when I was 10 years old. Growing up in an international community fueled my desire to understand the universal from within the midst of the shifting worlds around me. This curiosity lead to me studying philosophy and physics at Emory University. While preparing to pursue a PhD in cultural studies, I became interested in the powerful, and often harmful, function advertising plays in shaping the values of our technologically aligned society. Motivated by equal parts disgust and idealism, I took an ad agency job and aspired to use advertising’s influence in a more purposeful way.

My unconventional approach as a creative has gained recognition from every major advertising award show including Cannes, D&AD, and Art Directors Club. During my career I’ve worked internationally, managed multi-agency teams, taught, and produced press-generating work for some of the most recognizable brands in the world. It was during this time I picked up photography with a passion.

Four years ago, I left New York City for the Catskill Mountains to focus on art and other projects. After a two-year residency at Zen Mountain Monastery, I had the pleasure of working as a music and event photographer around the Hudson Valley. Capturing the spontaneous intimacy of live performance has been a wonderful challenge both technically and artistically. In 2019, I was honored to be a Visiting Artist at Marist College, which reignited my long-held interest in pursuing an MFA.

Photography is a way for me to show gratitude for this life. As someone with lifelong mental illness, photography offers me a way to connect, engage, and fundamentally be alive. From this perspective, every moment is new, and obstacles are transformed into opportunities. Just as every moment and person is unique, I strive to create images that can never be replicated.

Drawing inspiration from decades of experience with meditation and spiritual training, I’ve been using unconventional macro techniques to show flowers and trees as semi-abstract worlds of light. Using focus, depth of field, contrasting light sources, and white balance, the lines between inner and outer, form and figure, color and shadow, and clarity and obscuration become blurred. But the light I’m looking for can’t be seen by the physical eye alone, rather it’s known through the whole body and mind. I feel the photograph is a byproduct of this interaction.

But this decontextualization isn’t nihilism. I hope to find a new ground, a groundless ground that becomes apparent in the absence of what I think I see. In these moments a kind of self-awareness gives way to a direct and uncontrived experience of the mind. Given our media landscape, I find the more abstract, non-discursive photos to be increasingly refreshing.  

Equal parts contemplative and technical, I love photography for its ability to simultaneously show what is, and what could be. So much of our boundless world goes unseen and I believe photography has the power to make the invisible world visible. Many of the more abstract photos I’ve submitted are in a portrait format. In these cases, my intention is for each image to serve as a mirror for the viewer, rather than as a separate image from another time and place. I think this is largely why I don’t use Photoshop and capture everything in-camera. The world is amazing enough as it is.