Other work
Series made alongside and before the major projects. Most of them work with found objects, montage and the images a culture makes of itself: toys, kitsch, advertising, machines, libraries. The questions about belief, consumption and who writes the record run straight into the later work.
Bibliophilia
A formal study of libraries and physical archives while both are being remade for the digital age. The shelf, the book holder, the reading room: communal places where history is kept by hand, and worth keeping.
See more from the series →
PYADE
Advertising at every scale, macro and micro, real and virtual: airplane banners over the Indy 500, branding caught on Google Street View, logos seen from Google Earth, trash underfoot. The views sit together until you lose your place. I wanted people to notice how much of what they see has been bought.
See more from the series →
Limelight Firefight
Original and found photographs and video about toy guns, fashion and the earliest lessons in gender. Family videos shared online show children steered, through objects and performances, toward being seen or toward fighting, toward being desired or toward acting out violence. The work watches the steering rather than judging it.
See more from the series →
Flea Jesus: Beyond the Sacred and Profane
For five years I photographed every Christian object for sale at an outdoor flea market in Harpers Ferry. I came to it mocking the kitsch. Over time the pictures showed more than my bias allowed: small still lifes about capitalism, violence, colonialism, patriarchy and race, and about the limits of the person looking. These objects had been held and used, and had given someone comfort. The work tries to keep both the critique and the regard.
See more from the series →
Machines
A future built on Leo Marx's machine in the garden: the American dream of a peaceful countryside, always interrupted by industry. Each picture is a montage of American landscape, thrift-store objects and industrial parts: a middle landscape, lush and wild, ruled by machines. The work asks what we owe to the things we use and throw away.
See more from the series →
From Oz to Eden
My first inkjet portfolio and the core of my MFA thesis exhibition. Staged and montaged tableaus of imagined meetings between icons like Mickey Mouse and the Statue of Liberty, in the borrowed language of the political cartoon: funny, and aimed at the disappointing spectacle of American history.
See more from the series →
