Doll Faces

I imagine my work as a process of self realization and exploration. Like many of the images and work I produce, this series of "Doll Faces" are reflections of personal experience unintentionally emerging from the subconscious mind. Through this process I am consciously producing the unconscious. Which is to say, the objective of this work was not entirely apparent to me until its completion and I could view the images as an observer. Thus relating the visual effect to whatever the outcome of my emotional experience.

Raised by a mother who methodically fabricated dolls resembling family members, I fostered a myriad of feelings aroused by the dolls: fear, intrigue, absence, and expectation. To me, these seemingly innocuous toys represented everything that we, as humans, are not: an assemblage of perfection. Throughout my youth such knowledge plagued me and I questioned why I was unable- as a boy living in our hackneyed culture-to act out these perceived notions of perfection and beauty for myself.

Upon reflection, these images tend to carry with them forgotten experience (suspended knowledge), as well as lost emotion. This series in particular seems to deal with the inherent struggle to attain a balance between the inner (emotional) and the outer (physical); who you think you are versus who or what you appear to be (doll). In short, dolls objectify people, I have in-turn objectified the doll!

Atari: Color Fields

The genesis of "Light Series" occurred some 20 years ago: A young boy tearing through Christmas wrapping paper to reveal a new Atari game. It was a treasure, but also a mysterious technology that seemed overwhelmingly delicate, maybe even unsafe, in my shaky, excited hands. More than once I botched the insertion of the cartridge, producing random eye-dazzling bands of color that surely warned of the game's demise, if not the Apocalypse of the world. Who knew television, widely scorned as the vehicle for the dumbing down of America, would one day be a portal to groundbreaking ideas about my photography, in particular, the de-objectification of the medium itself. On the face of it, the artwork in "Light Series" (Centipede 10, Asteroids 1&2, Pitfall 5) represents the union between camera and poorly inserted Atari Cartridges. But more than that it's a continuum in my exploration of photography as a medium, from early images of realism followed by an inexorable peeling away of subject matter until all that's left is light, color and the buzz of a Sony Trinitron.