(click on an image to see works)

As the daughter of a commercial photographer, I have a great familiarity with and a respect for what the photograph can do. The photograph’s ability to communicate so directly and in such a flexible way has made it an influence and not just a medium for me. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, I feel that painting, because of its tradition and lengthy historical background, seems to more easily reveal a greater degree of intention, which is not lost on the viewer. As a medium, it’s handcrafted nature stands apart from the constant stream of digital imagery that we are accustomed to in our daily experiences. And yet the photographic image is the foundation on which we now base our understanding of the world; how we negotiate our place, our identity. And it is this negotiation of place and identity that is always at the core of my content.

I make work that depends on the photograph in an overt way, but still maintains the unique and intentional qualities of a painting. The images I create aim to offer a carefully considered view of contemporary experience in which history, geography and literature all have a prominent position. During a recent summer residency, I was able to explore ways to layer photography, painting and screen-printing in a series that used the traditional format of a medieval Book of Hours. My Book of Hours project was inspired by the rigid historical format, and what it revealed about the time and place it was originally created in. I adopted the organizational structure of that format to better examine parts of our contemporary experience through layered imagery, a contrast between the digitalized image and the handcrafted one.

The intersection of these two genres is the basis of another work called United States. In this piece I was motivated by the motif of the river in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; by the ongoing theme of freedom that the river represents in light of the context of slavery and economic repression. This, along with the contrast between rural and urban environments in the book, led me to start looking at our contemporary geography from above. GoogleEarth became a tool that, like my camera, helped me to find and investigate imagery. In United States, and the related works that followed, I was attempting to recreate a national geography with images that are based more on the layers of historical self identification, economic and agricultural organization, than on allegiance to any one map. The layering of digital prints with paint and collaged paper once again felt like the right way to approach the levels of meaning behind the subject matter.