Portraits of Ephemera
Portraits of Ephemera
Artist's statement:
I’ve always loved photography. In fact, my teenage dream was to sell art to in order to collect photography. This distinction between “artists” and “photographers” stems mostly from my personal obsession with the camera as a tool to be misused instead of mastered. Being a photographer required mastery of a tool I wasn't interested in mastering, but exploiting.
While photography is traditionally regarded as a means of documentation, with our culture generally accepts photographs as “factual”, I’ve always held the more mystic or philosophical view that all photographs are generally lies. In a universe that is fleeting, any “frozen moment” is not only limited by a camera's perspective, but is also immediately rendered out of context and something to be interpreted and not witnessed.
My use of the camera in the context of art-making is with the express intent of creating lies. Unmanipulated images that manipulate the mind; capturing moments that don’t exist, like the amalgamated interlaced frames of a half-second of scene transition of the television show CSI: Miami. Or presenting smoke as a sculptural object of intent subject to Meaning.
I’m forever interested in exploring the nexus of automaticism & abstraction. These works are created via performances; fleeting realms where events generate imagery and the camera is an actor.
The works are also an act of sheer hypocrisy: removing all ego and bias of an artist to create a “pure” abstraction, only to blatantly apply that ego and bias in curating which images are “art” and which are sent to the trash bin.
