Statement
My artistic practice is engaged with exploiting the ambiguity of visual experience—an uncomfortable zone between what we see and what we perceive creates a surprising metaphor. Things that are not alike are very similar in some surprising way. I aim to engage the viewer in this place where there are some ideas that intersect with the individual's consciousness. The work draws from many different visual elements such as the role of the structural, the system, the technological, the biological, the ephemeral, the fabricated, and the decorative, and for me, it is a meditation on the complexity of an increasingly dense environment.
I work primarily here in New York City and find the people, places, and objects of the city are the building blocks I am using. Many of the photographs reflect an interest in certain types of actors and their visual performances: people as reflected in and by the architecture of the urban landscape, bits and pieces of patterns and textual material, and how it all expresses itself visually.
The use of traditional materials and techniques characterized my earlier work. Before I was born, my father was in the Army. While he was serving in the Korean War, my father put some cash in an envelope and mailed it to a US Army Post Exchange in Japan. In return, he received a camera by Army postal service. When I was young, my father gave me that camera. It was the first thing I used to create images. Later, I studied painting, drawing, and printmaking at Columbia, but I returned to using the camera soon after. I explored the urban landscape, and was compelled by the textures and patterns of the environment.
My current work goes beyond the earlier explorations. Using a digital camera, I have created different images that bring together the varied elements. Using the interactions of fashion mannequins, the people, and the architectural environment, I transform the absurd and highly unstructured environments by adding my own structure. Adding color saturation, cropping, or burning in reflections, like using traditional darkroom techniques, I make change the environment and create new relationships among the elements.
The images are not accidents--the camera does not reveal things that do not exist, but can reveal things we filter out when looking directly at them. As a tool, it reveals--street reflections in a window, or an urban landscape reflected in the glass of a building. Using the images that a photograph creates is idealism and romanticism, form and color and profundity all wrapped up together. There are visual patterns, textures, and colors at play, and the ironies of the representational forms. At the same time, I am immersed in and part this process, so that what comes out of what I do is no different than who I am.
Although the digital negatives are enhanced using a computer, all manipulations are the digital equivalents of traditional darkroom techniques to control cropping, color, and saturation. I am starting with a single image, not compositing multiple images, and bringing up the images as I want. I control all of the creative aspects involved in my work, from the initial exposure to the final printed piece. My work is rendered as giclée prints (archival pigment ink printing) from high resolution files using acid free papers.
