FINE ART PORTFOLIO
My approach to the visual sphere is intimately informed by my formal training and experiences in my fine art and art historical studies. Embracing exploration and experimentation, my recent projects exemplify my style and interests as an artist and photographer.
Completed for my Honors Thesis, this project is a photographic diary documenting the intimate, women-only shared space that I lived in my last year of college. In our final months living together, we found comfort in a spacial closeness that would soon come to an end and never again be replicated in our individual lives after graduation. Acutely aware of the ephemerality of this time, we were frequently faced with the bittersweet finality that absorbed this period of our lives.
(Exhibited May of 2019)
Institutional places, while not devoid of life, maintain a sense of sterility that feels constantly at odds with the living people that occupy and utilize the space. Exploring the basements, bathrooms, and offices of an academic institution, this project focuses on the ways in which these spaces exist when unoccupied, appearing abandoned and neglected with remnants of human engagement—although they are not abandoned at all, but instead utilized frequently in their dejected state.
Semi-abandoned spaces have always fascinated me. This old laundromat in Easton, Pennsylvania had been purchased by the local college to be used as a warehouse for outdated furniture from the campus. With inklings of the former laundromat still intact, it had been transformed into a graveyard that embodied the expendable nature of things foundational to capitalism. Placing a nude woman into the space and having her interact with the environment, these photographs engage with this abandoned expanse, filling it with brief moments of life—documented only by the camera—that would cease shortly after the shutter closed.
(Exhibited Spring of 2017)
Focused on manmade and natural objects in varying stages of decay being reclaimed by the object (s) environment, this project was a broader experiment that began somewhat by accident. After several years, I noticed a pattern in the world around me and in the things that visually drew me in. Naturally occurring decomposition produces its own set of beautiful visual imagery, but the ways in which our manmade world is abandoned and then reclaimed by decay and nature is a reminder of the earth's ability to sustain itself well beyond the ultimately short life we experience inhabiting it.
(Photographs from 2015 - 2018)