In my narrative portraiture I am searching for juxtapositions of reality and fiction, horror and delight, good and evil, and light and dark.
The Collapsing Panorama
The Collapsing Panorama is an ongoing series examining the erasure of community as individuals in the 21st century engage in an obsessive presentation of self. Shot with a drone and utilizing subjects from the small town in which I live, The Collapsing Panorama comprises a set of panoramic stills composed at overhead angles, compressing human and non-human subjects into highly detailed maps. In some instances the subject is almost impossible to see, suggesting that although 21st visual technologies possess incredible clarity they are unable to capture the emotions, desires, and connections that underpin the human experience. Technology is not necessarily the villain in this series, however. In The Collapsing Panorama my human subjects willingly give themselves up to exhibition and surveillance. In photograph after photograph, these individuals engage in violent dramatic roleplay – frozen in kidnapping plots or posing on cemetery altars – gleefully exposed to the heavens. Ultimately, The Collapsing Panorama documents how readily humans lose themselves in easily consumable visual fantasies, skewing and impoverishing their lived experiences.
My photographs read easily as film stills. Many of them contain only one subject captured in a single moment in time, but each image contains tension between a past occurrence and a future one. The language of storytelling reveals itself in the setting as well as the gesture and expression of the subject. In my narrative portraiture I am searching for juxtapositions of reality and fiction, horror and delight, good and evil, and light and dark. It is the fine line between these opposing forces; the gray areas of the human spirit, that interest me. Underneath the beautiful, polished surfaces of my miniature, self-contained "dramas", there is often a sense of unease, longing and anticipation. I strive to capture the turmoil that is in each of us that wells to the surface. Despair and paradoxically hope, a thread of strength in a well of madness. The fragility of the human spirit, this is my muse. In my work I have lived the participation mystique, collectively working with my artistic tribe and subjects, to tell the story: the written word, the image, the brush, feeding off each other collaboratively, sometimes nurturing, sometimes cannibalistic.