The Pearly Gates Archive

The Pearly Gates Archive is my primary body of work through which I’ve channeled a decade of existential discombobulation, images digitally assembled, merging irony, nostalgia, and pieces and parts of scanned twentieth century photographs into the idiosyncratic language of vernacular photography. Gabriel García Márquez once optimistically wrote that “Life is the best thing ever invented.” The Pearly Gates Archive, circling this claim like water around an open drain, is a counterfactual examination of this statement.  Instead of facts, its analysis offers up evidence of absurdities being committed, one after another, serial observances of glitches in the matrix, so brief that one can’t quite put their finger on exactly what’s happening — nudging us to consider why it is that, as a species (and one of the best things ever invented), we tend to routinely place ourselves in existential jeopardy.