Artist Statement

In the summer of 1997 I was a college sophomore and having misgivings about my boyfriend. The year before, he'd fabricated a school project to spend time with my identical twin sister, Cara, and me. For his "documentary," Paul had spent hours photographing us, following us home on holidays and eventually we fell in love. I was strangely flattered by his attempts to get close to me, and then learned that he'd made up the whole project in order to do so. His eccentricities seemed harmless enough, until the day in May when I dropped a pencil, which rolled under his bed. Bending down to retrieve it, I was shocked to discover a collage of disfigured photographs of my sister and me.

I took a closer look and saw, within the tangled limbs and overlapping torsos, a startlingly poignant reflection of my relationship with my twin. How had my ex been able to express my personal issues so aptly? From that point on, the camera became a curious object of obsession for me. I knew I had to learn how the take pictures, because it would be the only way to truly see my own life.

Both of my bodies of work delve into issues of identity, authorship and control. My most recent series, Spoon River, is a pictorial interpretation of Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology", a collection of 244 poems told by the deceased residents of this fictitious town. The 26 lushly colored digital C-prints were shot near the MacDowell Colony, an artist's cooperative in the woodlands of Peterborough, New Hampshire. My pictures are not meant to illustrate Masters' poems, but to explore the interplay of truth and fiction that he created by basing his characters on people he had known growing up.

Dana Hoey, a professor of mine from Columbia University, said my work had elements of "a very real psychic drama," and that it was "epic, accessible, yet [a] very dark literary fantasy." Unsurprisingly I am highly influenced by Gothic literature, 19th century spiritualist photography, and Diane Arbus' cast of characters.

I make, not take photographs. To me, the word "take" implies a documentary intent, as was photography's early mission; a desire to truthfully capture life. I do not believe in empirical truth. For me, a work always tells the story of its creator.