Afterlife
Between Presence and Absence. Between Fragile and Decayed.
Having grown up near a de-industrialized city in Pennsylvania, I feel a connection to people and land in manufacturing towns in Connecticut, where I now live. In a landscape of red-brick factories surrounded by tightly-knit communities, I try to recall boyhood images of the tailor shop at the top of a hill on Oley Street, in Reading, Pennsylvania. That tailor shop, and the two floors of living space above it, are where my grandfather made his living and raised his family.
My interest is in documentation and abstraction—recording clues about the passage of time while engaging with light, shadow and shape. The mystery of each image is meant to remain. I invite each viewer to create a story based on what they see.
I recently re-engaged with photographs by John Divola and have found new meaning in his words: “I view photographs as artifacts of experience — traces of decisions made in time and space. My aim is not to illustrate ideas but to express a visual experience, a tension between presence and absence, between the fragile and the decayed.”
