Artist Statement

I grew up reading the ABC’s of Science Fiction—Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury. What intrigued me about the genre, and these masters in particular, was their skillful creation of alternate worlds based on a particular aspect of society. Infusing the protagonist into an exaggerated yet plausible future civilization was their vehicle to exploring contemporary society and its impact on the human condition. Often, Science Fiction’s vision of the future was dystopian, an extrapolation of troubled times into a seemingly inevitable and irreversible collapse of human dignity.

In this body of work, I intended to evoke a contemplation of an alternate near-future that reflects my personal concerns, not necessarily about future society, but about the future of what defines us as human. The characters populating these images have form but amorphous identities--humanoids that have evolved into something identifiably human yet not entirely recognizable. In short, something changed by the influences of a dystopian society.

Technology has a central role in Science Fiction as well as photography. Perhaps ironically, I used both past and present photographic technologies to hypothesize a fictional future. Cyanotypes, one of the earliest photography techniques, are inherently human, touched by an artist’s hand. As Bradbury wrote in Fahrenheit 451, “It doesn’t matter what you do…as long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.” Digital images, on the other hand, are sub atomic particles, captured and arranged by a computer necessarily guided by human sensibilities. Fused, past (human) and present (inhuman) sculpt an indeterminate future.