hang in there
Through multiple exposures on expired 120 film photographed with a malfunctioning Rolleiflex from 1952, I am creating a series of American, visual idioms out of the local histories of two cities, Los Angeles & New York City, that appear analogous in their well worn place in the pantheon of Americana. Depending on who you talk to in the United States, the two exist as avatars of the American Dream or a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. As a local to New York City, I was drawn to the bipolarity of these prevailing sentiments that a place could simultaneously be an American Utopia, an American Dystopia, or believed to be an apex at all. The resulting images exist as a type of event horizon which carries no positive or negative valence. Rather, in exploring particular neighborhoods whose present cultural capital and lucrative property values can be traced to the cannibalization and erasure of communities of color through forms of violence, the images suspend the soul scraps of an American past, present, and future, where the exploded view is actually a nexus of no-return.