Young Boy, Soft Mask - Limited Edition 1 of 10 Photograph

I am a photographer, book maker, mixed media and installation artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Though my work has gone through several incarnations - I began as a street photographer - my current work is about finding fresh ways to depict the movement of time. The Marmoreal and Crawling Backwards series examine how memory and experience shape and fictionalize our view of the past. I was profoundly influenced by my Southern Gothic background - my grandparents house in the tiny mill town of Griffin, Georgia, was filled with all sorts of exotic items that they collected around the world including a Polar Bear rug, poison blow darts from the Amazon, a 20 foot long snake skin and even a (allegedly) shrunken head. Though my work is clean and contemporary, my family history of inventors, sailors, preachers, artists, mill workers and a PE teacher thrown in for good measure, gave me the desire to create as a way of keeping the past alive. The key for me is to look at the past in 21st Century ways - namely digital distortions and layering of photographs and making images in the studio that serve as metaphors.