Interiors

I photograph pictures within the interior spaces of my relatives' homes. The pictures within pictures accentuate the use of photography in the construction of idealized family histories. The interiors are stark, more like model homes than lived-in spaces, and the portraits serve as counterweights to the nearly empty rooms. Each interior functions like a memory palace where spatial relationships establish a system for recalling content. Transitional markers like doors, windows, curtains, vents and frames enact the process of memory. Specifically, they emulate the barriers and passageways the mind unlocks in order to evoke the past. Mixing natural and artificial light heightens this experience, casting pastels into otherwise white spaces.

Repose

In the series, Repose, I mine my family photo albums and select images to restage. I recreate aspects of these images using myself and my family. I try to remember the circumstances of the original photographs as well as the spirit of the expressions and I ask my mother and sister to do the same as I photograph them; however, more often than not, it is impossible to return. The images touch on loss and the unattainable through juxtaposition of the past and present. They are about my shifting identity and my familial relationships. The photographs demonstrate an invisible thread that ties me, my sister and my mother to her mother although we are separated on genetic and temporal levels (my mother was adopted). The repetition of the poses, expressions and clothing has an uncanny effect: the remakes appear other than natural as they scratch at something just beneath the surface of our family psyche.

I search for something in the originals unique to me or my family members – an innocence or natural state uncorupted by culture and learned behavior —and I question whether or not this state exists. Repose, represents both my personal experience and my interpretation of the current cultural condition that provides the structure for our individual experiences. Repose is sad and funny and at times bleak. It is my attempt to reconcile some of the feelings I have about getting older, my familial relationships, and the potential—fulfilled or unfulfilled—that each family photograph holds.