Face Value is my MA Thesis which explores rural towns in Alabama and the public's necessity to reuse rather than build new. With a deadpan approach I was able to abstract the facades and surfaces of architecture to highlight the years of layers of utility hidden behind a top layer of paint. Nostalgia is a strong theme in this work as layers of history are brought forth to the top surface of these buildings.
"Empty Nets" is a documentary project encompassing the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and it's direct affect on local shrimping businesses of Mobile Bay, Alabama. An initial proposal for the project included portraits and interviews of those fishermen afflicted by the BP catastrophe. Once I arrived to the region I realized how many of these self-employed and small businesses were left to fend for themselves and join the minimal crews to clean up the oil slick. What was left as these gentlemen boarded their skiffs to prop up a futile attempt to save their ecosystem was a number of vacant shipyards and docks. The ghosts of the shrimping business were left bobbing in the still tides, with their decks clear and their nets empty.
These formal, hyperrealistic images study forms and architecture from the regions that my family previously inhabited juxtaposed next to the city I was currently residing in. These prints are large format at 32" square and printed on a highly reflective metallic paper. Kodak Endura Metallic C-Prints.
Permutations is my final thesis in my MFA. These black and white silver gelatin prints deal with light, space, scale, and depth of surfaces. The images are made by layering multiple negatives taken from an image bank comprised of animal bones and negatives from a scanning electron microscope. They are printed at a massive 38" x 46" scale to fill the viewer's periphery. The prints reference microcosms made of single atoms which are printed in a way to reflect their similarity to the macrocosms of space and the heavens. Orbs appear as celestial bodies and constellations but are in fact made of images smaller than nine thousandths of a nanometer.
