ABOUT DAILY PHOTOS
Shot almost exclusively with a cell phone camera, Daily Photos captures people in my circle of friends and acquaintances--artists and writers, musicians and dance artists, and avid cyclists--and puts the viewer in a position where he or she feels like an intimate equal. Other images --layered, painterly, and abstract--are a physical response to my environment. Multiple shots of the same subject create the sense of approaching, circling, or passing something, and crystallize the feeling of being in real space and time.
Two points of inspiration for this project are Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems (1964), which capture fleeting moments in a conversational tone that can belie the poem's underlying formal structure, and Robert Mapplethorpe's Polaroids (1970-75), which are similarly intimate and immediate.
The cell phone camera, which produces images that can be viewed and shared instantaneously, but which are necessarily limited and flawed, is the contemporary equivalent of the Polaroid camera.
PRESS
"Cell Phone Photography is SO 2010." Kelly Reaves, Gapers Block A/C
WITH THANKS TO
Debbie & Howard Best, Andy Best, Bryan Saner, Irène Hodes, Ira Murfin, Richard Fox, Eric Bork, Thon Lorenz, David Schalliol, Brock Rumer, Nell Taylor, Anne Holub, Zachary Whittenberg, Ira Murfin, Asimina Chremos, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Georgina Valverde, Eric Brasure, Brent Wegscheid, Sage Reed, Leo Rodriguez, Joanna Lakatos, and Miguel Cortez.
BIO & ARTIST'S STATEMENT ( CV )
I am a graduate of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, where I studied poetry with Scott Hightower and David Lehman (an expert on Frank O'Hara and the New York School of Poetry), took studio art classes, and developed a concentration in literature, cultural studies, and ideological systems. I presented a senior colloquium on the Dinner Table as site of cultural acquisition and ideological rebellion.
I work in the media of photography, illustration, and stitched illustration (embroidery). My photography has been featured on the websites of Chicago Public Radio, the Chicago Reader, Chicagoist, and Gapers Block.
I have a strong interest in capturing bodies in motion (including my own) in my work. My work often intersects with performance, both in terms of my process and the subjects I am interested in, and in terms of the artists that I choose to collaborate with. I have studied with Goat Island and other performance groups, have produced numerous dance performances, have drawn and photographed dance, have written about dance for Time Out Chicago, and with Jan Bartoszek, have curated an annual festival of dance on film.
Born in rural Pennsylvania, I lived in New York and London before moving to Chicago, where I currently reside. I spent half of my childhood imagining countries that I'd never been to, and the other half learning how to see my small town, my childhood home, and the nautral environment that I grew up in, in the greatest possible detail. Fantasties of places I've never been to, memories of places I've inhabited, and a hypersensitive awareness of my environment and my physical and emotional presence within it, are themes that continue to surface in my work.
A RUNNING LIST OF THINGS I LIKE
- Georges Perec, master of lists and catalogs
- Maps
- Raver Emanuel, multidisiplinary artist, collaborator
- Zines and Artists Books
- Goat Island Performance Group
- Quimby's, zine bookshop
- Chicago Underground Library, zine library
- Raymond Williams, cultural theorist
- David Byrne, singer, artist
- Wallace Shawn, playwright
- Frank O'Hara, poet
- Elizabeth Bishop, poet
- Links Hall, performance space
- David Hockney, painter, photographer, really sees trees, experiments with new & old technologies
- Unnaturally blue postcards
- Pigma micron pens
- Gerhard Richter, painter
- APICA CD15 notebooks
- Cell phone cameras
- Going to the opera
- Lillstreet Arts Center, art center
- Antena, art gallery
- Dinner parties
- Roni Horn, visual artist
- Synapse Arts Collective, performance company, collaborators
- Robert LePage, theater maker, opera maker
- Walt Whitman, poet
- Theatre de Complicite, theater company
- Patti Smith, poet, singer, artist
- Molly Shanahan / Mad Shak, dance maker
- Hedwig Dances, dance company
- Lucy Cash, filmmaker and dance maker
- Robert Alexander, photographer
- Trisha Brown, dance maker