Just as the holiday bells chime from churches in central Athens, throngs of people shove past each other in an arcade of flesh and bones. I started this project like one of all those people, shopping for animal carcasses in the signature brightly colored bags. My goal was to investigate the fundamental relationship of ritual and flesh, stretching from the Holy Communion honoring Jesus Christ’s corporal sacrifice to the impalement of the Easter lamb roast celebrating his resurrection. Using images drawing from the traditions of nature morte, the vanitas paintings of the Low countries, and the religious elevation of objects to relics, this series reminds us of our unawareness towards cultural conditioning, born through repetition and ritual. Though my interests lie explicitly in religion, the images seek to broadly question our acceptance of things as they are. This project wants to remind you that the bread distributed during Mass is transubstantiated into a holy body of decay inside our own and, by extension, the uncomfortable roots of the ceremonies that constitute our identification as an “us.”
With quiet intensity, "Vinculum" aims to underline the intersection of sensuality and violence - the venerated and the anathematized - by focusing the camera’s gaze on the skin. Strained and bound, the body becomes a focal site for investigations into the psychical density of desire. Physically, the body is approached matter-of-factly, as an object to be distorted, splintered, and re-interpreted. Silently statuesque while also loosely sensual, this photographs take an uncompromising and discreetly poignant look into how we relate to the physical presence of an other, the marks and taces that we leave behind, and the inescapable emotional weight it bears.
This series explores the edges of the metropolis, ever changing and expanding, as places of growth and decay, memory and amnesia, life and death. The memories held in these places are silently fading, and photographic film becomes the medium to capture what is invisible. The film is overexposed and distorted, so that an intense stage of darkroom post-processing is required to salvage a readable image. The enigmatic blurry image records the archaeological method of recovery and translation inherent to uncovering the memories and imaginaries hiding in the mortar between the bricks of a metropolis. Together, the images of “Memento Mori” attempt to create a historical portrait of a city obsessed with progress to the point of no future, but a perpetual present of change.
New York City is a place deeply rooted in time, in both its history and the manner in which its residents clutch onto every minute of the day. For the history of the city time seems to stand still, a silent reflection of cultural memory. This stillness is ruptured by the time looming over New Yorkers, a dynamic time of the new. The stillness of history becomes a ruin faced with a contemporary metropolis where relationships last as long as a bottle of California wine, where countless faces are constantly replaced by countless more, and where high rises replace building after building and get lost in the clouds after mere months of construction. The city is polarized between the past and the future, between the intimate moments captured in history and the ecstatic hunger for newness. The resulting collage bears the marks of place and time, like a derelict building covered in an ivy made of steel and glass. This project deals with places rooted in history but threatened by the contemporary. It aims to understand the relationship of erasure and memory in the urban fabric of the city.