Bio / Statement
Self-portrait from a biscuit tin camera, 2018. A self-portrait photographed with a self-made camera constructed from a buscuit tin. Photograph made at the darkroom for World Pinhole Day, April 25 2018. Animation created from an assemblage of individual contact-prints made from the paper negative.
When a family camera was placed in my hands as a child, I was immediately fascinated with this medium that « takes pictures ». I have since spent many of my years trying to understand what photography is, but more precisely what the world pictured in a taken image is. Does it contain captured reality, or is it merely a « proposition of reality » as former MOMA curator Peter Galassi has offered? Or, as I have considered, form a new reality – a parallel universe that becomes activated in the imagination as we view photographs?
At 12 years of age, I set up a darkroom in my parent’s basement, became a photojournalist at a newspaper in West Toronto at 15, and won the Canadian high school photographer of the year award at 17. I was accepted to the photography programme at the Parsons School of Design in New York with a partial scholarship. However, I studied photography and new media closer to home at the Ontario College of Art to continue my involvement with an Industrial music band I helped found – and went on to release several albums.
I freelanced in architectural and fashion photography, built kinetic sculpture with scrap electronics, and eventually became the Creative Director at a digital media agency. I later received an MFA in Photography at the Edinburgh College of Art / University of Edinburgh and am currently considering the pursuit of an DPhil.
History and the global archive play a central role in my practice. I draw upon the photographic ether to explore causes and outcomes and the medium’s power to shape narrative and perceptions of reality. The question of where photography ends, with the medium’s objective yet highly elastic relationship with the referent, interests me. I engage through its many-faceted processes and materials produced throughout the medium’s lineage, with a primary focus on the photographic negative.
I am less interested in the here and now of photographs and more interested in the shape of the universe formed through the photographic.