Entangled with Justice

My work is anchored in a moral sensibility that relates to my upbringing. I spent the first 18 years of my life on a prison compound where my father was the warden and where daily interactions with convicts were common. These visual and real life experiences nurtured a sense of empathy in me for the human condition that has been a guiding force in my life as well as my work. Entangled with Justice continues an ongoing exploration of the connection of fate, geography and politics in the direction of justice. My work is all photographic in nature, but possesses a close aesthetic relationship to performance art, drawing and painting. A large part of my methodology has been to abandon a considerable amount of control and allow the material to take over in some unexpected and unpredictable ways. In the case of my Entangled with Justice series, I circumvented the manufacturer’s specification of separating the negative from the positive of the Polaroid Type 55 film, and instead of fixing and washing it immediately, I allowed it to develop and decay over a period of weeks or months before I toned it for permanence. By allowing the chemical phenomena to randomly and arbitrarily impact the once available information in the image, the resulting shapes and forms in essence became metaphors for our own unpredictable existence.