It is finally done!

If you couldn’t make it out to the show, here is a little glimpse at what you missed. I will be selling prints, 8×10 books, as well as the large books seen in the gallery. Please email me with any questions regarding the work or for more information about purchase.

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They Built What Wasn’t

In our modern world, where community and personal interaction are becoming barely visible, we often tend to gloomily focus on all that can and does go wrong in our lives—sometimes even forgetting to live them. Each day, we all are presented with trials and tribulations, however, what I find most interesting and important, is how some individuals become resilient to life’s adversities, large and small.

For most of my life, I have had the privilege of working with organizations whose mission is to empower people to make their lives meaningful and beautiful. Through this work, I have found that the strongest individuals are some of the youngest. I believe that this is partially because children, universally, whether encountering third world or first world problems, have a common ability to transport themselves through their imaginations and reshape their realities by pretending.  By giving traumatic experiences a more visually comforting identity, they can initiate a means of emotional restoration, resolution, and eventual recovery.

In my work, I chose to focus in on five current issues that, today, have an enormous negative effect on individuals, specifically children. These include: poverty, sexual identity, war/violence/and discrimination, being pushed to overachieve, and neglect. Through my photographs and nursery rhymes, I strive to guide the viewer back to their youth in order to better understand how, through a child’s eyes, conflicts presented to them can become nothing more than fantastic places filled with familiar and evocative imagery.  To resilient children, the unmanageable no longer remains the unimaginable, rather something that allows them time to reflect and grow. It is my hope that these images will act as reminders that we, as creative human beings, have the capability to take life’s adversities and transform them, individually and communally, into something that is not only manageable, but, eventually, positive.

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