On their surface, Scrolls are a series of short sentences or paragraphs I have written to tell a complete story on a computer or tablet screen. You can click and scroll with a mouse or interact with a touch screen to reveal more text, which can change the meaning of the story at the Scroll’s surface entirely.

When I emerged from the religious cult of my childhood and young adulthood, I had to sift, dig, search, and obsess to uncover the truth as if gradually unrolling an ancient scroll. The interactive Scrolls are a proxy for that first-hand experience as I connect the slavery of the past to current social issues using vignettes of my own captivity.

In this contemporary storytelling medium I often use both my photography and my digital photo compositions to illustrate the pages, as well as other graphic art created expressly for the Scroll. Scrolls are both a deconstruction and an expansion of my printmaking work, contextualizing many of the same component images and concepts.

Each work sample is a short video showing how someone might interact with the Scroll, and each includes a link to the interactive artwork.

This is the first Scroll I have completed as I begin a new body of work: Scrolls that investigate historical figures and landmarks to reveal facts suppressed in the generally accepted narrative.

This Scroll begins with a description of the drive to visit the statue of John O'Donnell in Baltimore, the streets surrounding the public square where the statue stands (many of them named for O'Donnell and his family), and the hagiographic text on the plaque near the statue.

The mouse clicks and scrolling interactions are an archeological dig uncovering the Baltimore founding father's documented cruelty and his history as a slaveholder. Moreover, we are led to question how much of what we are invited adore and emulate in such historical figures is even true.

In my photographic work I explore the beauty of nature and humanity's grand but ill-fated attempts to transcend its immutable laws at any cost. Whereas my Photo Compositions and Scrolls are are an aggregation of disparate images, my photography is a studied deconstruction of the world around us.

To place my photography alongside my photo compositions, I edit the photos for color and light and print them on the same watercolor rag. While my photo compositions imagine scenes in the style of illustration or lithography, I use my minimally edited photographs to bring realness and immediacy to the subject matter.

In my printmaking and in my Scrolls, I use photography as a foundation for visual communication. These work samples are screenshots from my Scrolls and samples from my printmaking that demonstrate the notion of context, a common thread throughout my works in different mediums.

Almost every photograph I have ever used to create a composition has been my own. In this project I have included some rare exceptions: two family photos, and images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, used in my self portrait with permission.

My exploration takes on the material culture and social constructs that mask the pervasive and insidious nature of patriarchy, corporatocracy, white privilege, and institutional racism. These works envision the future that is possible--probable--when these constructs dictate political and social systems, forcing large segments of the population to focus intensely on short-term survival.