In "Renderings / Passages," I decided not to write a statement in advance of the show. Most press releases function as a guide or a key to the motivations of the artist and the preferred terms of engagement. For me, the press release often feels like a crutch to lean on when the content's message is too obscure to unpack or appears insufficiently engaged in the realm of ideas to be taken seriously in a contemporary art context. And yet, we all write them, needing to prove that we're worthy, relevant, responsible, conscious, and provocative. This has always felt disingenuous and misguided, and since this is my space and I'm making the rules, I've decided to take a different path.
Given that I'm often working in the studio space that overlaps with the exhibition space, I used my presence as an opportunity to witness how the people engage with the work, making the exhibition not only a presentation but also an observational, almost psychological, experiment. The exhibition has been evolving as I live with it, to see how changing relationships, spacing, and orientations might compel entirely different interpretations. Some images may be removed, others may replace them. Relationships will change and negative space will play different roles. The nature of this space allows for a fluidity that is not available in the context of a traditional gallery exhibit, and I will use this freedom to see how curatorial decisions affect how messages and gestures are experienced and interpreted.
For my entire career, whenever I've been expected to write a press release, I'm inclined to present it with expectations for how work should be interpreted. It's a natural impulse that's difficult to shake. But in this space, I've decided to mount the exhibition first, then observe the ways in which my work affects my audience and write a statement in light of those observations. This isn't to say that I alter the motivations or content to suit the audience; rather, I learn from my audience and see how my work succeeds or fails in communicating what I hoped it would. I get to see how shifting the relationships, scale, or proximity to each piece can change the entire perspective.
I've always been fascinated by the ways in which photography relates to our lived experience and the stories we tell ourselves. In our lives, we are at once participants and witnesses, subjects and authors. When I am photographing, I feel connected to our fundamental humanity—our capacity to observe and represent our experience in language and in art and to use those experiences and representations to help us become better—or worse—depending on how honest we are with ourselves.
In this exhibition, the answers to the questions "where" and "what," often the viewer's first, are intentionally opaque, made so using a variety of devices. In some pieces, the maximal clarity of the image and the lack of contextual clues make the image appear to be the subject itself, rather than a photograph of that subject. As such, questions of "why" and "how" emerge, compelling an engagement with my artistic gestures and curatorial decisions rather than with their own assumptions and preconceptions from another place and time.
In other pieces, I've simply rotated the frame. A simple and even easy gesture, it proved sufficient in disorienting and destabilizing the viewer enough to compel a less biased perspective. I've taken the original "Ridgeline" and presented it anew, with the inversion serving as both a physical and symbolic gesture that disrupts the viewer's expectations and leading instead to a consideration abstract aesthetic qualities first. In my observations, I’ve found that engagement with the artwork deepens when it challenges rather than conforms to the viewer's preconceptions, creating a more intricate and intriguing interaction than with a familiar landscape. It is only after a period of reflection and introspection that they are led into the image to discover the tiny silhouettes of the native trees of Joshua Tree National Park, and only then do they locate themselves and produce their internal projection of that landscape.
In 41.6286° N, 70.3870° W | 7:26 P.M. | 09.01.23 (DAD'S LAST SUNSET) and 41.6286° N, 70.3870° W | 7:31 P.M. | 09.01.23 (DAD'S LAST SUNSET) (seen below), all the information the audience would need to answer the most common initial questions is provided in the titles themselves. And yet, the images themselves look more like abstract paintings than renderings of a specific time and place.
Indeed, these works have particular significance to me as they were created during a concentrated reverie of experimentation—far out on the tip of a jetty in the Nantucket Sound, alone but for the occasional bird. The last breaths of summer tickling my skin, the surreal glow of what seemed to be an endless sunset, observing every detail and using my camera to mark the seconds. The subtle variations of wave, water, wind, light, allowing my camera to flow through a system devised as an arbitrary structure on which to place the whims of my impulses. My thoughts touched on predecessors like Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, who employed systematic methods to determine form; I allowed a dance to unfold between the random chaos of nature and my agency. All this reverie, this deep focus, this meditative communion with a moment, felt like it was stretching outward in both directions infinitely, just 28 hours before the untimely death of my father.
[After having reached a saturation point with all the images I had taken for the commission, I felt my efforts had proven successful. My plan had been to leave that evening and return home, but then I was struck by an impulse to walk out onto the jetty one last time. Before I knew it, it was dark and I was hungry, so I stayed the night. In the morning on four-hour drive home, a call came: my father lay 'actively dying' in a hospital directly along my route, only five miles from the exit that led to his facility.
While this exhibition isn’t autobiographical, it emerged in the wake of an introspective essay on my father's passing—a standalone piece that can be found in the Thoughts section of this website. Crafting this essay was a pivotal artistic endeavor—possibly the most significant artistic gesture I’ve produced—that inadvertently set the stage for the conceptual framework of this show.
But I digress...
The images I produced on that jetty were taken between the hours of 6:27 and 7:53 p.m. on September 1st, 2023, off the shore of Osterville, Massachusetts. Each of the images worked through different shutter speeds, orientations, focal points, relationships to the dwindling light, effects of wind and tide. It was systematic to a point, but that was more of a construct to work within and against. The resulting images were markers of a specific period in a specific place documenting the fluctuating characteristics of an atmosphere in transition.
When I brought two framed pieces from this series to my gallery, I had the intention of hanging them with a horizontal horizon, but I then started to think about what might happen if I turned them into vertical images. When I did, something clicked. It made so much sense. They became pure abstractions. The pieces were more than photographs, more than their medium. They were sent to a liminal place, a transitional place, much like where I was on that jetty, where my father was in his bed. The vertical gradient is read not as a landscape but as a symbolic space depicting a passage, a progression, a movement. These moments in time were, much like they felt to me while I was frozen in an expanded moment on that jetty, stretched out within themselves revealing something eternal, universal, fleeting and permanent all at once.