Home Page Image: Jessie from Tangled 2011
Tangled is set in wooded areas where the natural landscape is photographed, then altered using digital methods. Fantastically lit thickets and felled branches serve as backdrops to a cast of characters that seem to possess clues to secrets existing just beyond view. No specific story line is spelled out.
For me, this project represents the most recent chapter in an obsessive retelling of a story from my past about a child who has lost her favorite toy. She imagines the toy has come to life and she longs to go out into the world in search of it. Tangled gets its inspiration from various children’s books and fairy tales, and seeks to awaken in its viewer the kind of unquestioning sense of adventure that can thrive in the imaginations of children.
Across my body of work, I explore themes of loss, memory, imagination and dreams. Photography can freeze and eternalize what would be fleeting moments in time, but there is no mechanism for this in dreams. We rely on memory. The moments and scenes represented in my work exist in a mysterious space somewhere between the real and the imagined, because there is no way to photograph dreams.
Tangled is set in wooded areas where the natural landscape is photographed, then altered using digital methods. Fantastically lit thickets and felled branches serve as backdrops to a cast of characters that seem to possess clues to secrets existing just beyond view. No specific story line is spelled out.
For me, this project represents the most recent chapter in an obsessive retelling of a story from my past about a child who has lost her favorite toy. She imagines the toy has come to life and she longs to go out into the world in search of it. Tangled gets its inspiration from various children’s books and fairy tales, and seeks to awaken in its viewer the kind of unquestioning sense of adventure that can thrive in the imaginations of children.
Across my body of work, I explore themes of loss, memory, imagination and dreams. Photography can freeze and eternalize what would be fleeting moments in time, but there is no mechanism for this in dreams. We rely on memory. The moments and scenes represented in my work exist in a mysterious space somewhere between the real and the imagined, because there is no way to photograph dreams.
