creation ⇄ perception
It started early, with a child’s curiosity about how the world changes depending on how you look at it: closing one eye, then the other, watching the world shift and rearrange itself. It was a discovery of parallax, without knowing there was a word for it. Parallax is the apparent movement of an object due to a change in the observer’s viewing angle. More importantly, it was teaching me how to see.
Photography was the first medium I took seriously. Looking through a viewfinder is the first in a long series of decisions. What is inside the frame, what gets cut out, what stays sharp, how long the shutter is open. It was never capturing a thing in the world. It was capturing a version of it, from one point in space and time, with a point of view. Before long I was finding photographic framing in my mind, even without a camera in my hand.
Every medium after that asked for different decisions, and each new set led me to notice things I hadn’t. Film added time, sequence, and a way of turning sequence into story. Drawing removed the lens and became about flow. Digital layering could take a dozen photographs and make something closer to an abstract painting. Standup and spoken word taught me how to take a memory and turn it into a joke or a story, in front of an audience that tells you within seconds whether it is landed. Generative AI is the newest tool and probably the strangest. It started as a playground and very quickly became a test. There is nothing to point a lens at, and nothing in the world to refer to. I was not interested in replicating reality. I wanted to bend it, and to have it hold up anyway, as something real, or cinematic, or tied to an aesthetic.<
A photograph comes from something in the world and a person who frames it. Take away the something, and the person is what is left. Imagination was always part of it, even with a camera in hand. Here the material comes from memory and from everything I have ever looked at, harvested rather than photographed, which is close to what I did on stage with stories out of my own past. What is different is the pull of the generative models, and the work of getting past what they want to give you.
Through all of it there has been one throughline. Each medium changed how I perceived the world, and that changed how I created, which changed what I noticed next. The process was the thing.
Creation informs perception, and perception informs creation.
The images and films here are evidence of that, and of a habit that started with closing one eye and then the other. Most of them came from pushing past the constraints of the tools, or past the conventional wisdom about how they are supposed to be used.
I’d rather not tell you what to notice. What you take from these may have little to do with what I intended. Anything here that earns a second look has done its job. That’s where it starts for me as well.
New work, direct to you.
New films, art and gallery additions. No algorithm between us.