As an artist, I am interested in change, growth, perception, and imagination. I am fascinated with decontextualization and reconstruction, and the process of art moving fluidly between known and unknown realities.
This series examines backlit skin of fruits and vegetables - common and exotic, fresh and rotting, colorful and muted. I carefully remove the skins to unveil intricate textures, blemishes, colors, and patterns that take on new identities once removed from their original shape.
Skin that turns into a mysterious cavern. Skin that resembles beautiful satin sheets on an elegant bed. Skin that reveals a luminous lightning storm in a dark night sky. Skin that transforms into an underworld pool of solid, liquid, gas and plasma. These organic abstractions invite the viewer into the realm of fantasy - an imagined landscape, a dynamic world that transcends literal boundaries and proposes new narratives.
Dear reviewers,
I was unable to enter the entire background artist statement below, but was able to do so here:
Since the sudden loss of my father in 2007, my work has concentrated on the aftermath that accompanies loss. I documented my family’s struggles and examined aspects of my own bereavement. In years to follow, my curiosity grew into exploring how other people coped with death and transience. I began with photographing roadside shrines all over the United States and abroad. After that, I became intimately involved with photographing families who had lost loved ones to violent murder in the city of Camden, NJ. By happenstance, investigating impermanence became a significant emphasis in my work.
Last fall, I held a leaf up to the sun and was amazed by the backlit beauty in the abscission. The rot and detailed destruction uncovered different narratives – some favorable, some detrimental and hostile. As I photographed the decompositional shift in the leaves, the abstractions became symbols of transformation within my images, and also within me as an artist.
I began to look at fruits and vegetables differently too – as bodies to examine. I started skinning them. I boiled, microwaved, and baked them. I dried some skins and soaked others in bleach and various chemicals and allowed many to rot, decompose, and dry out. As a result, this series confronts the viewer with defamiliarizing the familiar. Metamorphosis, mutation, and the expiration of living beings is inevitable. Viewers will see aspects of their own changeability and mortality represented in other organisms transcended in my work. This venture will bring forth the viewer’s feelings and personal experiences with change along with individual interpretations and visions of familiar, yet abstract landscapes. There will be a remnant of absence restored with expanded substance and unprecedented significance.
