Multiple Exposure Photography Series

The photographer Alfred Stieglitz, whose photographs often depicted aspects of the everyday, described his own work as the “exploration of the familiar.” This particular fascination of looking can be directly seen in his Equivalents cloud series. For nine years he routinely took photographs of clouds, serving as abstract equivalents of his own experiences and emotions. This active process of looking and evaluating relationships within aspects of my everyday life has informed my current practice.

My pastime of cloud gazing and daydreaming has particular relevance to my recent work. In the process of looking at clouds we imagine things other than what is in front of us. This child-like conjuring of persons, places, or things is an important human process of “making something out of nothing.” The phenomenon of recognizing something in meaningless data is called pareidolia and has inspired these works, but also a larger metaphorical working process. These photographs and videos start with images from the real world, and through transformation they become hybrid forms. They confuse the boundaries of their reference and challenge the viewers’ perception of what they are seeing. Superimposing images through layering, I push them to varying degrees of density by creating simple composites, fields of color, and meshed textures.