My work is simplicity in chaos. I find elegance in random street photography and represent an uncomfortable calmness in the performative double self portraits with missing body parts. There is a stillness that can be found in my black and white photographs of people in their workspaces and silence that penetrates the expresionistic digital generated and traditional ink on paper, and dry point scribbles. This stillness carries over into even my kinetic images from moving vehicles and into my portraits of the desperate faces of street peddlers.
My practice is chaotic and restless, sometimes whimsical. Each series is varied in theme and topic driven by a fury of ideas. Through all my work I strive to represent incongruence, not just in the overarching idea of chaotic simplicity, but also visually and conceptually.
At once grotesque and serene my Fear and Trembling doppelganger self-portraits with a severed head on a plate and other severed body parts are not immediately gory, there is no blood or real violence. The images are both intense and fatalistically relaxed. The hard-edge of the scenes are softened by the almost expressionless face portraying indifference or submission. The images can be subtly funny and overtly disturbing. The chaos lies in the unsettling nature of the images and balanced by their calm aesthetics.
The cameraphone books have conventional imagery of street photography, family candids, and walking images, all taken with a cell phone camera. Using the cell phone camera as a visual diary, I capture the elegance in the random chaos of routine commutes, social situations, and visual minutiae of everyday life. The photographs are democratic in both the chosen images and the method of the photographs’ creation. Cell phones are ubiquitous and almost all phones have camera’s built into them dispelling the notion that they are solely verbal communication devices, but visual as well. This low-fi/hi-tech combination is the underlying premise exhibiting the view that accurate replication is not necessarily representing truth, conceptually extending the idea of impressionist painters of the nineteenth century–that exact mimesis did not necessary capture the true beauty in nature.
The cell phone is hi-technology and it’s camera takes low quality photographs, images that are less accurate, less true-to-life, so in the strictest sense they are low-fidelity. Though because cell phone cameras are almost everywhere, making photography and photographic imagery more accessible than even the Kodak Brownie did 100 years ago, the images are more amateur, less polished and seem more real, more raw, more believable. The photographs are even truer to life than more accurate and precise photographs made with more tradition tools. It is in a sense reality photography. Mobile phone photography becomes culturally hi-fidelity due to it’s very perceived authenticity and yet, simultaneously low-fidelity because the images are pixilated and of low technologically quality.
I am not attempting to make order of chaos, and I am not explaining anything. I am providing evidence of the liminal state and simultaneity between entropy and enthalpy. Everything is as it should be–simply an elegant mess.
