Several years ago, while sorting through boxes of family photographs with a view to culling the collection of images, I discovered an assortment of tightly rolled photographic scrolls. These scrolls, depicting groups of campers, rows of school children, and adults sitting at dining tables, were taken decades ago with a wide-angle banquet camera. My interest in these vintage photographs eventually expanded to cover other commemorative events such as an assembly of new recruits during WWI.
  
Back in the studio, I began to strategically unfurl and rotate these scrolls, sometimes lighting both the front and back of the image, as a way of revealing simultaneously the photograph and autographs scribbled on the back. The landscape framing the edges of the picture was also of interest, suggesting ways of manipulating the scroll to emphasize its presence.
 
Given the relationship a photograph inevitably has with the past, my desire is to focus on the act of remembering. The contortions of the scrolls—the twisting, curling, and blurring during exposure—mirror the fragility of memory. My manipulation of the scrolls attempts to evoke how the gap between the photograph and memory continues to widen as the time when the picture was taken recedes further into the past.

The photographs represented in this section are drawn from the longer version of my video Memory Foam, which now runs for 13’51”.  Memory Foam attempts to blur the boundary between the individual and the world through shared experiences as evidenced, for instance, in the overlapping infrastructure collaged from several basements or the number of ubiquitous framed photographs of family and friends that appear throughout the video.  Clock faces serve as pauses or intervals between groups of images.  The presence of digital technology explores how our personal environment is increasingly mediated and monitored by technology.

Landscape and national identity are inextricably linked.  The United States’ incredible geographical diversity continues to be an ongoing subject for artists and storytellers.  Like mounds and pyramids, cemeteries are part of a larger story narrating the impact humans continue to have on the landscape.
 
Scrolling through countless maps on Google, mile by mile, I discovered that every state in the contiguous US has at least one cemetery situated on, or within a few hundred feet, to a state line.  This realization was critical in providing a focus to the project.  I like to think of Relative Time as a kind of national survey of these border cemeteries.  More than a straightforward typology of cemeteries, I hope the photographs reflect my varied responses to the details found each cemetery and the site’s relation to the greater environment.
 
Like a surveyor, my tripod is grounded in the cemetery with the camera lens directed towards the neighboring state.  Adopting this position was critical in thinking about the invisible lines that divides swaths of land into separate states.  Although there may be considerable political divisions between states, the landscape is generally contiguous, a large plot of land that we all share.

The conveyance of energy is a fundamental concern in Lifelines, my ongoing series of photographs depicting electric cords.  Some of the cables have been repaired many times.  I am struck by the effort to ensure the flow of electricity before the objects are re-wired and the old cords finally thrown away.

At least one of the cables shown in the image powers the light source that illuminates the scene.  Like the activity of drawing which employs line and shading, the cable may change its identity from a crisp line to a faint trace as if it was a ray, wave, particle, halo or flare of light.  The narrative aspect of the cord’s trajectory and the use of everyday materials impart a palpable quality to the light.  My rendering of the cord is a way of giving life to light.