Title: In The Finest Tradition
Photographic medium, Color Photographs, Digital "C" Fuji Crystal Archive Print
Dimensions: 30 x 30 in (76.2cm x 76.2cm), 48 x 48 in (121.92 cm x 121.92 cm)  
Portfolio Images:  20 x 24 (50.8cm x 60.96cm)

"In the Finest Tradition" displays my interest in ideas of gender and identity. Among my earliest memories are those of the socially ingrained concepts of identity and maleness. Coming from a male-dominated family, much of my framework of maleness and its manifested psychological constraints that defined how I should be was, for me, an absurdity, a one-sided form of inclusiveness of the male construct.

The men in the photographs are performers in an area of identity, a lifestyle. Many of my subjects do not fully embrace the persona of the uniform as masculinity, nor do they reject role-play concepts. Instead, they step away from the trappings of the male code and choose the parts of masculinity they want to bring into the mainstream—the uniforms these subjects wear become extensions of their fulfilled imagination, creating a universe they occupy. The images are intended to be of male archetypes, exhibiting extremely masculine roles or career choices, showing the pageantry of the uniform as an affirmation of identity.

Title: ArchitorSpace  
Photographic Installation Project 
Dimensions: 30 x 40 in (76.2cm x 101.6cm) or 40 x 40 in (101.6cm x 101.6cm)  
Color Photographs, Digital "C" Fuji Crystal Archive Print, Framed

The "ArchitorSpace" photographs display my interest in and fear of the banality of spaces in enclosed areas within postindustrial architecture. These places are typologies of contemporary postindustrial architectural aesthetics that make the individual appear displaced within the uncanny. The photographic strategy is to make these images heavy with absence purposefully, forgotten entirely familiar places. These deserted (non-site) environments reveal no history or functionality.  

The environments depicted in the images conjure up subconscious memories, pointing out the familiarity within the redundancy of postindustrial public architectural space. In the images, tunnels, corridors, and lobbies are enclosed public arenas in which you are viewed and exposed to the scrutiny of others. They reveal a particularly banal and commonplace emptiness, which has become prominent in postindustrial society and our spaces.

I photograph these interiors from a direct, frontal point of view, at a sufficient distance to include the entire space in its flat and melancholic state where the individual vanishes in the glare of fluorescent light. These architectural portraits become matter-of-fact, demonstrating the primary function of the still photographic image, which is to record a temporal space. They are spaces in which a room, office, or corridor is virtually indistinguishable from another; repetition and redundancy collapse into an architectural singularity. Within the images, the subjects who otherwise occupy these spaces are engulfed in the void of here-could-be-anywhere, into the monumental dissolution of space and contemporary architecture.

Title: Indifferent West  
Photographic Installation Project 
Dimensions: 20 x 20 in (50.8cm x 50.8cm)
Color Photographs, Mounted and Framed

Indifferent West is a photographic series investigating the Western American landscape and tourist architectural sites. Through this project, I photograph the found and sentimental representations of the mythic frontier and the center of American iconify. The images are of tourist sites and familiar and cliche places, but they also cite the lack of a picturesque image of an ideal landscape. The photographs represent an American western landscape from the point of view of a tourist. Traveling from place to place in this contemporary American West, sites representing cultural influences where the romantic constructions of land and people perpetuate a mythic West through its institutions. The results are that the West has become a vast site of touristic ventures where elements of kitsch and consumption about space intersect with the comic. These models developed by private entertainment industries for tourism project the notion of an untamed, hostile wilderness, seeming lifeless and void, which becomes raped in myth, attending to what is called the American West. The West had become a place where the Lone Ranger, Marlboro Man, and the Noble Savage were invented and where they continue to reside in the collective cultural unconscious. The images show a recontextualization of the American West, indifferent to history, establishing an American psyche that has become a self-referent notion of ambiguity.