ARTIST'S STATEMENT

 "Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches Art, but by Theatre."                 

                        -- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida


I like to describe myself as an artist working at the crossroads of photography, performance, and the written word.

I am interested in effigy and adornment and how human beings invest objects with power; in gender and sexuality as forces that define or confound identity; in ritual and performance and their physical trappings. I explore these themes in still images through an artistic practice I call “self-imaging” or “performance photography.” My own image appears in many of my works, and I think of myself as both a medium and a subject of these pieces.

As an artist, I am driven more by impulse than by intention, more by intuition than by the deliberate desire to make a particular statement. I often discover what I'm trying to say somewhere late along the road between the first idea and the final product. It is extremely satisfying to me when someone finds a resonance or connection in my work that I did not consciously plant there.

Some of my work synthesizes image and text. My biggest influence in doing so comes from contemporary dance artists who combine spoken text with movement. In putting words and pictures together, I'm trying to do more than caption or explain. I hope to achieve a fusion of elements in which the specificity of language and the allusive quality of image each derives greater meaning by virtue of being placed together.

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