WORK IN PROGRESS

In the early 1900s my grandfather’s family ran a circus that traveled by train throughout the American Midwest and South. When my grandfather was a teenager, he left home to join his brothers in the circus. But after one summer on the rails, they sent him back to finish school.

For the past few years, I have been working on several projects that bring me closer this history, a history that has seemingly vanished.

I would never call myself or my family circus people. We are not nimble, and we are not nomadic.

Nevertheless, this circus history intrigued me; I began to teach myself circus skills and video record my efforts. I also started to photograph myself embodying different circus personas.

This project to date records the struggle in finding the past inside the present, discovering the imaginative potential in the every day, and tapping into one’s own desire to continue to transform and become — even in mid-life — when everything can feel fixed.

In 2024, The American Stage Theater Company invited me to create the projection program for their production of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and The Angry Inch. The collages featured here were incorporated into a 6 minute animation that accompanied the live performance of “The Origin of Love,” a song based on the Plato story.

The additional collages were incorporated into the Hedwig narrative.

Borderlands documents both the virtual and physical US/Mexican Border.

After the 2016 US presidential election, I began visiting Google Earth to study the wall that separates California from Mexico. I noticed that glitches in the mapping software allow users to slip through the wall into another nation’s territory. Immediately, I began to video record my Google Earth travels. The digital aberrations of the collapsing wall seemed to me a perfect symbol of our fragile border and the myths and narratives that we use to construct our nation’s histories. These glitches inspired me to make three physical trips to the US southern border to photograph the landscape.

Borderlands consists of inkjet prints, video captures, screen prints and an accordion fold book/sculptural form (VSW Press, 2021). A text weaves through the nearly 200-inch-wide accordion, making for “A Physical and Virtual Index of Numbers, Codes, and Crossings (in no particular order).”

Borderlands offers a new vision of the U.S. Mexico border that challenges the traditional notion of here and there. Instead, the project reimagines the border as a continuous composite landscape, one that is typically only experienced on virtual platforms.

Borderlands is a unique accordion book/sculptural object published by the VSW Press in 2021 (Rochester, New York). The book measures 11.5 x 13.5 inches closed, 11.5 x 175 inches open, comes in a hand screen printed, die-cut slip case, edition of 125 books. Click here to learn more.

In my photographic series Scheduled Implosions (2014–2016), I consider the temporality of our constructed landscape by photographing media coverage of building demolitions. For this series, I use a medium-format camera and instant film to shoot still images of news coverage of building demolitions found on the internet. I employ long exposures in order to make visible the tensions between the still and moving pictures. My new images offer ghostly visions of a collapsing world and point to our collective fascination with violence. They also allude to recent political events, such as the failure of Wall Street, the recent housing crash, and international conflict and war.

In addition, I have been altering the code of jpeg images to intentionally corrupt files of architectural plans. The digital corruption renders each plan useless and anticipates the inevitable collapse of each structure. These new images point to the impermanence of our world and the corruptibility of the images we create about it.

In Battlegrounds (2011-2013), I depict the iconography of war. I also consider how my own understanding of war (as an American civilian) is mediated through images. Thus, I re-photograph preexisting pictures of battlegrounds in order to show how the material elements of a photograph influence my perception. The war I see is empty, dislocated, and hazy. These images offer a fragile vision of human experience and damaged landscape.

Target Practice Installation, 4 mirrored military targets, plexiglas, 14 x 8 feet, 2012

The artist book and photographic series, Battle of Monmouth (2010), pictures a Revolutionary War site located outside of Freehold, New Jersey. Today the Battle of Monmouth exists in fragments; excavated bullets, cloudy horizon lines, and illegible texts mark the conflict. The Monmouth book does not attempt to retell a single historic narrative. Instead, It presents a collection of image fragments that suggest the limits and possibilities of historic meaning. As an artist, I am interested in how we can begin to imagine a war that pre-dates the invention of photography.

The artist book and photographic series, Battle of Monmouth (2010), pictures a Revolutionary War site located outside of Freehold, New Jersey. Today the Battle of Monmouth exists in fragments; excavated bullets, cloudy horizon lines, and illegible texts mark the conflict. The Monmouth book does not attempt to retell a single historic narrative. Instead, It presents a collection of image fragments that suggest the limits and possibilities of historic meaning. As an artist, I am interested in how we can begin to imagine a war that pre-dates the invention of photography.

Artist Book in Process | Every Window in My House | Spring 2020 (Covid-19)

On March 15th, my family and I left Brooklyn, New York, to quarantine in our home in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Initially, I started to photograph "Every Window in My House" in order to give myself purpose and to refocus my energy on light and color, rather than the nightly news. For the past ten years, my artwork has focused on ideas of war and nationhood, but this, sometimes daily sometimes weekly, ritual of photographing my windows has reminded me of the power of photography to uncover extraordinary meaning in seemingly ordinary objects, gestures, or routines. This reminder has been a small gift in an otherwise bleak landscape.

In 2018, I went to Suhareka Kosovo with a group of participants from Adelphi University and ArtsAction Group. In Kosovo, we collaborated with the Fellbach-Haus to lead workshops in cyanotypes, create a multimedia mural, transform a room in into an active camera obscura, and build a large-scale obscura installation. The following images document the obscura installation. The source photographs were originally collected from members of the Fellbach community; they represent pre and post war visions of Kosovo. Later, these images were made into cyanotypes, rephotographed and projected on to suspended panels inside an active camera obscura.

Limited Edition Artist Book

Battlegrounds is a photobook in three parts: Field Diary of a Non-Witness, The Battlegrounds, and The Implements.

Scheduled Implosions or I see War (Everywhere)

I Surf the web. Clicking, Clicking, Clicking Like a child’s toy gun that lost its pellets. The more I click, the more images I find. I see men in helmets, smoke as it disappears into grey skies, strong backs that carry large knapsacks, canteens dangling from waist belts. I pause on an Image by Horst Fass I am in Vietnam, 1965. My mother tells me she was in Wisconsin studying history. Helicopters, like birds, peck at the muddy sky. Men flock North avoiding bullets. Today we are in the middle of an election. The candidates talk tough in suits. My son plays Star Wars. He says: “blasters are not guns.” He makes strange sounds. This world is fragile.

H.S.A. — 2016