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A Land to Die In
deconstructs and recombines imagery from massive multiplayer online games, such as World of Warcraft, to explore the visual history of the wilderness, anachronism in advanced technology, future possibilities of the photographic subject, and the breaking points of the traditions of linear perspective & representational art. A Land to Die In has existed in many forms including outdoor installations, panoramas, virtual galleries and books. The final chapter of the Fantasy Trilogy.
The Eternal Garden
is an intimate account of the early years of the American Gothic Lolita/EGL fashion scene but also an exploration of memory, loss and the stylistics of melancholy. Charting a drifting gray course though high teas, fashion shows, photo shoots, movie premiers and dinners, The Eternal Garden embraces the ambivalent difficulties of navigating the personal and public in art-making.
Bridges of Desire
is an autobiographical photo documentary about my experiences at anime conventions across America. Shot over seven years of traveling as a fan, the wide-ranging images explore the back stages, over-heated crowds, drunken wanderings, trysts and 4-AM hotel edges of the con scene as it changed from a small clique of college-aged fans into a young-adult media powerhouse. It's swirl of large, gritty, black and white photographs revel in constructed & morphing identities, costuming-visuals as the first impact of communication and the way that making self-conscious art amongst a tightly knit subculture is deeply alienating.
Flâneur
is a collection of photographs shot over many years of rambling walks in Santa Monica, CA. The project contains three parts. The first is a series of single images that ponder the small, often melancholy, poetics of the fluctuating architectural surroundings. The second part is a sprawling archive of the curious names that developers give local apartment buildings. While the third section is a series of repetitive shots of one particular empty lot lost in the flux of wildly inflated land prices, rent control and fickle weather.
The first part of the Fantasy Trilogy
examines the history of the genre of fantasy and how it was turned from literature to games though a sprawling installation of paintings, interactive sculptures, vulgar sayings, political tirades, re-purposed advertisements, painting history and mytho-poetic parodies of HarryPotter and Lord of Rings. The general sweep of the three parts of the Fantasy Trilogy is to use the ways that one genre has changed in relationship to it's fans as a test case to explore more generally how the relationship of art and imagination have changed through the radical shifts in media, advertising and technology of the past century.
Arcana, or, Finding Contect
is an extremely heterogenous photo installation that borrows and mimics numerous languages of art-photography to hold an argument between the fading landscape of social fantasy gaming (like Dungeons and Dragons) and the rise of the solitary experience of console video games such as Final Fantasy and each of their possibilities for meditative moments and meaning. Part two of the Fantasy Trilogy.
Japonisme
is a project built out of rephotographed collages of
anime
advertisements, fan-created porn comics (
hentai
doujinsh
), Japanese photo history and the lingering rich and troubled history of Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles, my work tries to delve past the slick, cute,
kawaii
surfaces to examine the orientalist legacy and erotic inspiration which bubbles under the surface of this new-millennium Japonisme.
The Apartment Homes Fake Book
is a raucous series of gritty xeroxed large-format photo books which use stream-of-consciousness sequencing to explore increasingly interconnected mental muck-scapes of sex, myriad of fantasies, urban planning, reflections, shards, mapping and art-narcissism.
