In the Studio
My mom always stored rolls of film in the butter compartment at the top of the fridge’s door. A 35 mm Canon camera was an accessory equal to her purse - my mom was always documenting. Photo albums and photographs were never hard to find in our home. The smell of leather book covers, the shine reflecting off glossy prints, the feel of thick matte pages, the sound of crinkling plastic sleeves, the weight of the albums, and the connection to the people in the pictures is a sensory experience rooted in nostalgia and memory.
I began carrying around my mom’s old 35 mm film camera when I moved to Savannah back in 2017. I have been taking pictures with my mom’s old 35 mm film camera for the past six years. With the bombardment of smartphone photographs, I realized I wanted to feel the same emotional attachment to pictures that I did as a child looking through photo albums. The photographs that I take with the film camera are devotional and sacred items.
My practice stems from film photography. Film does not lie, it is trustworthy, safe. For years, I have been observing and documenting family members, best friends, lovers, old flames, close confidants, mentors, partners in crime, loved ones who no longer exist. Aware, but unfazed by my presence, I capture my subjects in moments of premeditated spontaneity. The negatives and prints are relics and kept safe in the confines of photo albums and shoe boxes. Photographs are scanned to my tablet and smartphone, existing in an album titled “Memory” and they accompany me to my studio.
Glancing from the large paper tacked to my wall to my iPad hung across the studio, I carefully follow the lines that form the people and objects in the photographs displayed on the screen. When I am no longer in a trance state or in the zone, I take time to look at the painting and go back into the work with white Flashe or acrylic paint, sometimes color, and erase the unnecessary lines. The history still shows through, but the noise is no longer at the front of the composition: fading into the past, never completely erased, not as bold as the present. I am taking line and meditative/active practice using three foot long paint brushes, distancing myself from the work, covering up what does not need to be at the front and what is no longer necessary to see clearly. I work on large sheets of paper and paint with bright, saturated, and neon pigments derived from vinyl, acrylic, and gouache paints that mimic colors rooted in a digital atmosphere.
My work lives in the space between the limitlessness of new digital media and traditional photography. Smartphone cameras have eliminated the materiality and sentimentality that the photograph once harbored. Social media platforms encourage a virtual vomiting of images that are curated and edited to perfection in order to gain followers and viewers. Large accumulations of digital photos and videos, AI, and surveillance dominate the digital world, and I am curious as to where that leaves us with the objective of photography and image. I am investigating how
digital and physical worlds overlap in a time where technology is advancing at an unfathomably rapid rate.
Kinetic in nature, these works are dynamic and always in progress. The paintings are living portraits of the memories I connect to my photographs. I resurrect and immortalize my subjects with subtle personal knowledge that is never fully revealed. I never throw out paper, I never get rid of photographs - these fragile fragments cannot be erased, for they represent amalgamations of a person, of people, of memory.
One of the corners in my studio houses a short metal bucket where I stored my bar tools when I worked as a bartender. Now, this bucket holds a couple dozen three foot long paint brushes constructed from wooden dowels, a variety of paint brushes, electrical tape, and velcro straps. I began making these brushes years ago in Savannah, GA when my mentor, Todd Schroeder, let me borrow one of his brushes - it was a bamboo stick around four feet long (Todd is a tall man), and at the end was a piece of linen folded into an oval, and secured with tape onto the end of the stick. He told me that he began to paint on paper with long “brushes” while he worked as Brice Marden’s studio assistant for a handful of years. I used Todd’s bamboo brush while painting on the large paper sheets that I tacked to the wall, and found that the distance between me and the substrate created by the length of the brush forced my entire body to be active, to feel the lines that I was creating from the photographs that I was referencing.
While I have developed my painting practice over the last seven years, I have recently been experimenting with time-based and long-term projects that include self-surveillance, recording daily activities, and fully embracing digitized media. I want to continue expanding in new directions that will transform my work into space and off the wall. Installation would allow me to show the cycle of production in my work that discusses the relationship of the digital and material by utilizing technology like projection, large format printers, sound equipment, cameras, and animation combined with paper, objects, sculptures, and paintings.