Artist Statement

I take pictures of things that look like art but aren’t meant to be – subways ads, construction fences, mailboxes, signs.  I’m interested in how street artists, routine maintenance, and organic decay, create dazzling textures and forms resembling abstract paintings, mixed media, and collage.

My work has roots in the nouveau réalisme movement in 1960s France, whose practitioners displayed posters lifted from billboards and mounted onto canvas.  These artists democratized art by disrupting ideas of where and how it could be made, blurring the line between public and private space, the gallery and the street.

I’m part of a collaborative process, stepping in to document a work at a particular moment in its evolution and before it disappears forever.  My role is to see a subject’s potential and recontextualize it, lifting it from its environment, as an autonomous image.  I make minor adjustments to exposure, contrast or color cast 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.

Our dictionary definitions of art confirm our bias towards the human hand.  Of course, we often call things in nature art because of their symmetry and beauty.  My work is a blend of the two.  The human factor is only sometimes intentionally creative, and the natural one about decay.  Often, it’s impossible to tell what exactly created the image.