Been and Gone

“Been and Gone” is a series of photographic work about drifting away from home. In January of 2020, I moved away from Vancouver, the only city I had ever lived in, across the country to Toronto for work. I left most friends, almost all my family, and the place that had shaped and formed me as a child. Over the course of several weeks, my brother and I traveled down the entire west coast to southern California, across the Mexican-US border all the way to New Orleans, then up through the midwest to Toronto, making pictures along the way. Almost immediately after moving to Toronto, COVID hit. I was forced to isolate with these pictures and connect the dots in a longer photographic narrative. In quarantine, I found myself constantly thinking about my early childhood memories and formative experiences that I was recalling when making pictures on the road. So much so that these memories began to shape the narrative of the sequences I was experimenting with. So I decided to merge the two, sequencing photos from my own family archive with pictures from the trip to create a dialog between the photos I had taken on the road and the memories of my past that they illicit. I wanted to arrive at a sequence of work that remained deeply personal to me in a more linear road trip format, but ambiguous and abstract enough in its vernacular subject matter to let the viewer impart their own emotional experiences onto the series and its themes.