“The sky isn’t up there; it’s between us.” - Luce Irigaray[1]

I create photographs and digital videos that represent spaces between presence and absence. Three sites explored in these images are the former C.F. Hathaway Shirt Company factory[2] in Waterville, Maine (“Hathaway Series,” C-prints, 2005), the former Bethlehem Steel Company Plant[3] in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (“When the Bough Breaks,” digital video, 2005), and the  vacant Bardwell Farm in Keene, New Hampshire (“Bardwell Farm Series,” 2007-8, works in progress).

I am interested in the way memory works and how we project our subjective experiences onto the past. Although these images serve as referents to specific places at particular times, they do not merely document. Through interpretation and contextual slips, these images evidence corporeal traces, encompassing both representation of place and our remains in history. By creating a fluid narrative throughout this body of work, the imagery reveals aspects of social disaffection. Questions emerge: How do we value place beyond its function as a commodity? Can my actions within a vacant factory change it? What becomes of objects that are “left behind?”

My performative, “micropolitical” actions within these previously controlled labor sites create new potentialities. Via motion and long exposures duration is made slower. My identity as the photographer and the site’s affects merge; the images render each site beyond its physicality. Through scale, perspective, and sound, viewers can comprehend such vestiges of place and what is yet to be. This different understanding can change not only viewers’ specific milieus, but also the future possibility for what is represented.