Average Subject / Medium Distance

Photography has long been an expanded medium and it continues to take on new forms. My work engages this plural space by employing both established and novel modes of picture creation. On the one hand, I use the camera to organize discarded objects into new taxonomies. On the other hand, I generate projects that question photography itself, its conventions, mechanisms, and representational problems. This body of work merges abstraction with hyperrealism, formal territories that are normally opposite and distinct. In this effort, I hope to unveil aspects of the contemporary unconscious mind while revealing the underlying structures implicit in the image making process itself. Turning the camera on its own logic, the photographs in Average Subject / Medium Distance (2018) reconfigure paper guides once used to determine exposure and other image settings. Stripped of example imagery, technical numbers, and explanatory text, these relics from midcentury photographic practice are reduced to their underlying structure. In the process of removing this information, digital traces are created, shifting the surface into a rupture between physical and virtual, analog and digital, functional and useless. This process creates a new surface that hints at broader formal themes in the medium. A single word remains in each composition in its original location, while all the other information has been neutralized. This word operates as a springboard for interpretation while pointing to the priorities and conventions contained in the original object.