Artist Statement

I take pictures of things that look like art but aren’t meant to be – subways ads, construction fences, mailboxes, signs. 

Artists make art in a studio, but art on the street is created by diverse and in often unknown ways: artists working independently, workers removing posters, organic decay, or a combination of these things. 

My work has roots in the nouveau réalisme movement in 1960s France.  The artists Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains mounted posters lifted from billboards onto canvas and displayed them in galleries.  They democratized art by disrupting ideas of where and how art could be made, blurring the lines between public and private space, the gallery and the street.

My role is to see a subject’s potential and recontextualize it, cropping and lifting it from its surroundings.  I adjust for exposure, contrast or color cast to maintain consistency and balance, but don’t intervene in the physical work nor alter pixels once it’s recorded. Somewhat paradoxically, I make enhancements to photographs of distressed or degraded surfaces which are themselves improvements of the original, “pristine” photograph(s) on which they are based.

When we think of art, we are biased towards the human hand.  Our dictionary definitions of art confirm this.  Of course, we often call things art in the natural world because of their symmetry and beauty.  My work is a blend of the two.  The human part is only sometimes intentionally creative, and the natural part is about decay.  Often, it’s impossible to tell which of these was responsible for the image.