I am a self taught artist rooted primarily in collage and photography. My main body of work is a series of woven photographic tapestries depicting the built environment, primarily urban and industrial. I’m drawn to historical structures that demonstrate the hand of humans and the passage of time. The presence of people is implied, but rarely shown, as I prefer to allow the structures to speak for themselves.

Each weaving is created by taking photographs from multiple angles. For “Hall of Justice” they were taken from each level of a stairway opposite to the construction zone. “Back Story” incorporates twenty-two separate images that were taken from multiple levels and the full width of a parking structure opposite to buildings off an alley in San Francisco. I wanted to portray the buildings as if inhaling and exhaling. I combine the photographs through the process of physically cutting and weaving them together, splicing each warp and weft as I go to achieve the desired degree of abstraction and smooth transition between images. They are essentially collages that were made by weaving instead of pasting images together.

Each finished piece consists of hundreds of splices. The process is detailed and time consuming, allowing me to deeply connect to the place. This forever changes my relationship to the actual place as I come to know it so intimately.

By incorporating multiple viewpoints together I am recreating the journey our eyes take over a scene as we peruse it. I use controlled abstraction to confound the senses and slow down the process of seeing, hopefully creating a deeper experience for the viewer. For instance, “Barn at the Bay” appears to be a straightforward view of a barn. However, if you look closely, the doors are impossible. Every dimension of the barn was altered to make it appear more monolithic within the landscape. It becomes both real and unreal at the same time.

During the pandemic lockdown I felt compelled to work more with pure form, color, texture and pattern.  This was a way, I believe, of keeping myself grounded in positivity even as the world around me turned dark and distressing.  I spent the next year and a half working with spray paint and exploring shape, pattern and texture.  The result has been a series of works on paper. 

The digital collage series grew directly from that experience with spray painting.  As I pivoted back to photography, the work took on a much more abstracted nature.  This lead to the digital collages of stairs going all directions.  During the pandemic and politically unstable times compounded by major changes in my personal life, this seemed to speak to how I felt.