Image/Artifact is a series that pairs photographs taken with my box camera and slip cast objects that were found in or around where the photograph was taken. These forensic like investigations reflect a personal history and narrative through issues related to archaeology and human history.

This is a series of objects primarily made from slip cast stoneware. They reflect how objects are found at excavations and how they relate to the modern world. Knowledge is 300 modern wisdom teeth slip cast and placed into baggies. Teeth are one of the most commonly found fossil. While we currently have no need for them, I am philosophizing about fossils of modern man in the future. Recant are slip cast pieces of modern trash found along the Jones Falls and mill areas.

These chromogenic prints are torn and reassembled to represent the distorted and manipulated body. They are then sew together with needle and thread with what look like suture marks. These marks symbolize the lengths we go to reconfigure the human body for plastic surgery, gender re-assignment or even to repair what was deemed abnormal. These images are life size.

This series uses modern x-rays that are then placed onto black and white photographic paper to create a large contact print/photogram. The x-rays of bones are placed similarly to how fossils of man kind are found in archaeological excavations. The use of modern bones that are anonymous is a personal look at someone and combining it with the idea of fossils makes many correlations with the past and future of humans. These are all life size.

Using journals of my Great, Great Grandmother who came to America when she was 16 and my Great Grandmother who was 1st Generation American, I am creating work that relates past and present, old world and new world. Transferring their writings onto clay slabs like that of tablets in ancient times where cuneiform was inscribed, is a reflection on the stark difference of the past and communication today that is mostly electronic.

I also continue to investigate the repeated process of multiple copies in photography. Creating a photogram of one of their journal pages and making a copy of it, up to a 6th copy, where each represents a generation. With each generation, the written information becomes distorted and unreadable. This in turn reflects how information becomes diluted or lost from the passing of one generation to the next.

As I uncover the history of my own family through old photographs and documents, I am reconciling the past and present. This personal quest motivated me to use an old box camera that is like restructuring time, the old focal depth alludes to visual remnants of the past. By forcing contemporary scenes into the vintage aesthetic, I’m questioning history and its narrative. When coming across old photographs with limited knowledge of the facts and history behind the image, one starts to interject their own ideas of what happened.
Building off of this idea of narrative, I have been creating a series called Opening Lines that pair images with writings that lead the viewer through thought provoking circumstances. My recent work has gradually been shifting towards a fictional narrative where creating correlations between sometimes disparate visual and written information creates a story within itself that is left to the viewer to interpret. This collection of combined stories and images will ultimately be published into a limited edition book.