Referencing the nickname for a darkroom technique for significantly manipulating the brightness of parts of a photographic print, The Hand of God investigates the most omnipresent element used in the production of photographic work – light.

 

Working in the studio and on location, photographers, videographers and cinematographers employ a wide range of lights and lighting modifiers to control, diffuse, shape and contort the light illuminating the scene. While these tools are never directly seen in the final composition, their use is integral to the desired aesthetic outcome, each fixture and modifier leaving a specific visual fingerprint in the image.

By turning the camera around – away from the scene and onto the lights and modifiers themselves, my photographs in The Hand of God make visible what is required for the image to exist: (controlled) light. While it is impossible to thoroughly visualize the exact impact each individual tool imparts onto the image, these images serve as a catalogue of how artificial light is employed to create a photographic image.

The work is presented as a series of large-format photographic images, reproducing common photographic and cinematographic lighting instruments and tools found in studios and on commercial sets.

 

The Hand of God continues my ongoing investigations into understanding and interpreting the viewership experience – roughly, “what we see and how we see it”. In previous projects, I have documented the stains, folds and imperfections of old and deteriorating projections screens (imparting their unique marks into the projected image), physically represented how digital technologies represent color, questioned the validity of ‘expired’ and abused test charts, and revealed how Photoshop interpolates a single pixel. My practice is about the experience of the image, and The Hand of God expands this artistic conversation by depicting the most elemental of photographic forces.

2,153 Days: The amount of time between when I was hired into full-time academia and when I was awarded tenure.
 
Academia is, at its best, an ambiguous notion. We’re trained to be specialists in one über-specific topic, yet necessity requires us to be generalists within our classrooms. Our primary responsibilities are to our students, yet we must publish or perish.
 
As a faculty member teaching in the visual arts, these dualities become even more apparent: creative practice is referred to institutionally as research, and, in order to be promoted, we must have a clear research narrative and trajectory. Research is colloquially defined within the academy as contribution to new understandings and generation of unique knowledge, but I’ve always struggled with that makes photographs unique in the same way as, say, a scientist or historian.
 
With this in mind, for the past seven years, my research narrative has been a near-mechanical inquiry into how we experience the (digital) image – its (re)presentation on screens, recordation as colors and pixels, and reproduction as a subjective dataset. In crafting this strict narrative, I disregarded the image, and my own connection to the image itself, in order to present a cohesive story of the influences, theories, and aesthetic structures supporting my work.
 
These images, then, serve as a counterpoint to that exacting narrative of “what we see and how we see it” – somehow, by living on my phone and in random drobox folders, they didn’t feel like research, but rather, as documents of my life and memories from the corridors I walked and situations I experienced as a tenure-track faculty member. Looking back through this archive, I now see them in a new light. Full of anxiety, tension, and uncertainty. Relatively devoid of my friends and daily grind, they’ve come to represent everything that, as a former photojournalist, continues to fascinate me and makes me question about the still image. They don’t fit into my academic dossier, but without these images, I would not have made the work I’ve made in these past 7 years

Transliteration (n) – to represent in the characters of another alphabet 
Transcolorations stem from my efforts to translate digital color science into physical forms. 

Through the processes of rendering a series of ICC (International Color Consortium) Profiles – documents and standards that define how computers represent, interpret and process color data – into three-dimensional space, they effectively transliterate color science from bits of data into tangible forms and objects. 

As 3-dimensional objects, the works give form and structure – weight, mass, volume – to the abstract notion that computers need to define color. Taking on formal sculptural qualities, the works balance elements of science, data and visualization to show the viewer that color remains relative, even in the absolute binary of digital data. 

By digitally photographing the rendered shapes inside 3d visualization software, they become separated from their referential usefulness and are translated into pure expressions of color, shape, form and light. Without any absolute references to the physical model, they begin to ask questions of where the data originated from, and how our relationship with (and understanding of) the data can change our perspective on how we view and interpret.

Vertex takes the work from Transcolorations and abstracts it a step further, back into the rectangle of the photographic image.