What stories are necessary? How is a story an archive? How is it a mine? What would investigative news look like if it defied linear prescriptions? What if it were made out of things found in attics, or dollar stores, or libraries, archeological digs, date stamps, and graffiti, or picked up on the bottom of a shoe? How can the intimacy of a first-person narrative be developed by an uninformed body through the examination of primary source material? What is the difference between things that are happened upon, looked for, or read? These are the principal questions that drive my practice.
Central to my work is the use of atypical processes and storytelling strategies to excavate and chronicle stories that may have fallen on deaf ears, are socially relevant, and have the ability to be personal on a variety of levels. I juxtapose images, objects, and spaces to summon stories that elicit rich metaphor and social exchange in an effort to pique awareness, introspection, and valuation.
A story, storyteller, and audience have a mortally symbiotic bond. I am interested in examining this bond through varied methods of communication, modes of allusion or implication, and any other means necessary to yield a breadth of experiences that serve the communication of a story. My intent is that the audience actively finds a story through investigation, not just observation. The work is meant to operate as a catalyst of sorts; where the story lies just below the surface and, because of one’s own curiosity, a viewer engages in an inquiry that leads to their becoming the primary storyteller. I’m interested in the way that context, inference, or even absence can contribute to a narrative. How a site, or scar, aged tool, or an old receipt may tell a story in such a way that yields new information or no longer necessitates a narrator.
I want the work to convince someone to interrogate its components so that the objects, imagery, and orientation confess what it’s holding. I want the work to engage a body viscerally while catalyzing an emotional response that resonates intellectually. I want the work to operate simultaneously like a new secret, an ancient legend, and memory still being recalled.
