Artist's Statement

Somewhere Between Truth and Memory: Photograph Collages

Most of my collage images consist of hundreds of pieces and/or layers, constructed using anywhere from 25 to 75 individual photographs. Many are inspired by urban scenes: train stations, familiar streets, architectural landmarks, or iconic places. Others feature rural settings, landscapes and trees. And some play with formats, such as diptychs, triptychs, and panel sets.

Initially influenced (transported, is more like it) by David Hockney's "joiners" and photocollages, I experiment with digital techniques for combining photograph fragments. It is an intuitive process, beginning with the image capture stage, all the way through--months later--to the recreated scene. Each collaged image is about what is happening, or what I am feeling, in the specific place. Sometimes its about the people who pass through the space during a particular time, as I am fascinated by the ways in which strangers share not only the place, but its appealing, evocative nature as well.

The collages are also about sensing; how the (or, at least, my) brain works to assemble bits and pieces of information it perceives into a coherent whole--that resembles, but can never exactly replicate, what is actually there, including the emotional charge. And they are about patterns, about how the mind searches for the familiar, while trying to make sense of what is new; and to find a place for that, alongside what it already knows. It is a process that is iterative, dynamic, static, random, orderly, musical, mathematical, chaotic and even magical, all at the same time; yet somehow we understand it, at least on some level.