From Day 1 of starting the Fourth Wall series, I declared: “I am going to flood the room!”. My friends looked at my like I was nuts. After all, I had just signed a contract for a studio on the second floor. My room was being built inside of another room that wouldn’t allow me to easily move it. And there was no way anyone but me was going to risk getting in massive trouble by pumping hundreds of gallons of water into a second story room.

I kept trying to figure out how we would do it. A long vacuum, I said! Lots of buckets! A huge tarp that would catch the water! A portable swimming pool! But nothing seemed realistic enough to not severely damage the old floors we were standing on.

Finally I came to terms with the situation. I had three options: I scrap the picture entirely, I Photoshop water into the room, or I painstakingly disassemble the room and rebuild it outside in a pool. I went with the latter.

When the day came to create the image I asked some friends to come help. Two of them were hours late, but it turned out to be an easier job than I thought. I had stressed for months about the difficulty of the situation, but with a few good friends we were able to have almost the whole job done before the rest of the crew got there! It took one full day to take the room apart, set up the pool and fill it, and rebuild the room inside of the pool. Thankfully I sweet-talked (that’s how I like to see it) the manager of the studios we rented and he let us set up the pool (15 feet in diameter) in the parking lot near my studio. Even so, we loaded the pieces into a truck and drove it closer, since the wood I used was so heavy.

We even strategically build the pool right next to the dumpsters for easy disposal of the room.

The pool took a lot longer to fill than I anticipated. The morning was spent taking the room down and moving it, while the whole day was spent filling the pool from hoses. Lunch came and went and we all took bets on how much longer the water would take. Just when the light got really good outside (toward the end of day with mountains blocking the direct sun), the water finished and I was ready to shoot.

I knew that I wanted very specific looking props in the water. I chose the yellow chair which I had in my studio the whole time. I got it just to sit on and because it looked neat, but I realized it was perfect for the flooded room I was creating. I went to several thrift/antique stores to find this painting, which had the right colors. Everywhere I went I asked for paintings of a ship, and this was the only one that was the right time period and color palette. Finally I brought an old book to submerge.

I went flipping through the book to find the perfect page and there it was. I sunk the book and took some shots, making sure you could read the book page if you looked closely enough. It reads: “Epidemic of Fear”.

Everything was in place. The only trouble was that I didn’t have my normal setup. I put my ladder in the pool just outside the room but there was no ceiling to attach the camera to. Further, this image was going to take longer to shoot to try and get the water moving in the right way with the subject. My friend started out holding the camera, which I attached to my tripod and had her lean over the walls, holding it up as high as she could. It wasn’t an easy task, since it was heavy on the end of the camera (thank goodness I had switched to a mirrorless camera so at least it was lighter!). Eventually she had to take a break and switch off.

Because of this the image was shot closer than the rest, so I expanded the frame outward slightly. There wasn’t a lot of editing that needed to happen in this image to get it to where I wanted it – mostly color enhancement. I remember the first 15 minutes of shooting the shots were all out of focus. I couldn’t get a good measurement on the distance between camera and subject and the person holding the camera kept moving up and down out of exhaustion from holding the camera. Eventually we got it!

This image was very special to me. I have always been afraid of water and have always had problems with fear of any kind. I even have “Fear is the mind killer” tattooed on my arm to remind me to face my fears. It is a quote from Dune by Frank Herbert. I think that fear is a fascinating topic. The fear of being trapped, of feeling out of control, of being in a space that is invaded by something else entirely. These are all natural fears. This is what many of us try to avoid. The book sank to the bottom of the water after about 10 minutes of shooting. I remember feeling that it was a beautiful sign – the book about fear suddenly lost it’s boyancy. It lost the battle with the water.

As Frank Herbert writes in Dune – “Where the fear has gone there will be nothing, only I will remain.”

I hope you enjoy this new series which is on display and represented by the JoAnne Artman Gallery until February 18th. It is showing in New York City (Chelsea).

Very limited editions. Each print is offered at 42×42 inches with an edition of 2, and 8×8 inches with an edition of 3.

You may contact the gallery for purchase requests. Each print has been proofed, signed, and numbered by me, and comes with a certificate of authenticity.

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Photographed with a Sony a7ii and a 25mm Zeiss lens.

Model: self-portrait

Assistance: Tim Condron, Wakyna Fullington, Kelly McGrady, Matt Force

From beginning to end, this shoot with molasses was hysterical, fun and unforgettable. There is something very satisfying about pouring sticky syrup all over someone. You feel like a child and you giggle uncontrollably and it isn’t even harmful, so it is fun all around!

This image started when I was trying to think of a new way to portray rebirth. It is a theme I deal with often and that continuously delights me. The idea of someone being reborn, like a phoenix, is motivating and inspiring to me personally. Not to mention the visual of the phoenix bursting into ash is forever etched in my mind as one of the more beautiful sights my imagination has built.

I wanted to create a girl coming out of darkness, yet also being reborn from that darkness. I started thinking about what element I could put in the room with her. One thought was to edit a hole in the floor for her to be coming out of, and I created that image as well, but ended up feeling like Photoshop wasn’t something that should be obviously featured in this particular series. An upcoming picture that you will see was heavily edited, but hopefully not in such an obvious way, hence the distinction.

When I realized the hole in the floor wouldn’t work, I went back to thinking about texture and what textures were missing from the series up to that point. That was when I started thinking about something slick and slippery. At first I wanted to use oil, but with that being an impractical choice, I settled on syrup. Syrup, though, was too thin and light in color to work for what I wanted, so I chose molasses: thicker and darker.

I laid down a cream colored plastic shower curtain on the floor to protect the floor but also create contrast between the dark molasses and the light floor.

The first pose I had chosen for this image turned out to be too sexual in practice. It didn’t have the right feral feeling to it that I had wanted. So, I scrapped that pose and while my model was in the molasses we played a little bit. I instructed her to curl her body up as tight as she could while still sitting up. I wanted a twisted look to her body and told her to play within those confines to twist and contort. It was a challenge as it was slippery down there, but she did an amazing job of giving me several options to play with.

I used a swimmers cap on her head to create the bald effect, which worked great and was thick and tight enough to withstand the slick molasses. In post I edited minimally to enhance the highlights on her body and hands especially.

I hope you enjoy this new series which is on display and represented by the JoAnne Artman Gallery until February 18th. It is showing in New York City (Chelsea).

Very limited editions. Each print is offered at 42×42 inches with an edition of 2, and 8×8 inches with an edition of 3.

You may contact the gallery for purchase requests. Each print has been proofed, signed, and numbered by me, and comes with a certificate of authenticity.

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Photographed with a Sony a7ii and a 25mm Zeiss lens.

Model: Kyna Lian

Assistance: Kelly McGrady

Sometimes life is funny the way we are so interconnected. I went online searching for a model for this image and was delighted when the sweetest girl offered herself up to flop over in some flour for an hour. When she arrived to my studio for the shoot, which was located inside of an abandoned high school, she told me that her mom used to attend that very high school. We imagined that she sat right there in the very room that her daughter was about to create art in. It was a really magical moment to realize that.

When I began this series, I started asking people – strangers or family – what they felt they couldn’t tell other people. A lot of people answered with a similar sentiment, which was the feeling of wanting to be one way, but everyone seeing you as someone else. I know the feeling well. There are times in our lives that we want to change, to grow, to finally become the person we have been dreaming of  being. But we have already created an identify for ourselves (or society has) and we find ourselves unable to embody the future version. We are pigeonholed and molded into who we “should” be instead of who we might become.

When I began thinking about how to visually portray this idea, my mind kept going to black and white – contrasting colors – something striking. That was when I had the idea to allow race to play some part in the image. There are always many sides to an idea, so instead of holding tightly to the theme of being held back from who you want to be, I recognized it could also be the theme of having your current identity stripped away by what others want or expect of you. The flour coating her body and exploding all around her spoke to me as a way of communicating the force of that push and pull. The way the flour stuck to her face seemed to me like a mask – the one we hide behind or the one we are given.

This image left me with yet another very difficult task. Getting 600lbs of flour up and down the stairs. By this point in the shooting process I was berating myself for agreeing to a second floor studio. It felt like every day I was battling with those stairs, or the fear that my floor would cave in. Alas, it never did, but my muscles definitely felt the burn of the heavy lifting. You know the funny thing about flour? When you get it wet it turns to dough. Cleaning was no easy task, particularly when it insisted on lodging itself between the old splintered floor boards.

Before cleanup came the shoot, however! And it was a very, very fun shoot. I bought a sleeping pad and laid it on the floor in the room. I then covered the pad with a white sheet that stretched most of the way around the room. After that, we poured flour onto the sheet and made sure the room was solidly covered. When my beautiful model arrived, I briefly explained that I had laid down a pad and that she should crouch down and side flop over onto the mat. I wanted to ensure maximum poof.

(I should definitely make t-shirts that say “MAXIMUM POOF”, right?)

We never could get the right amount of poof everywhere, but I did get enough of it that I could add some of the better poofs in with the better body position for added effect. I was so worried she would hurt herself as she fell into the flour, but she insisted she was fine and wanted to keep going. I suppose diving into a bunch of fluffy powder is kind of fun, right? So we played and played for about 30 minutes until we were all floured out.

This is one of the simpler images that I created for the series. I chose to make the walls very dark, painting them before the shoot. I really wanted the attention to go to the place of most contrast in the center of the image and not pull from that. I remember struggling on this day technically. It was very, very hot so the flour was sticking to us all. Aside from that, it was quite dark in the room so getting a shutter speed that could accommodate the movement of the flour and her body was a challenge, but eventually I found a setting I was happy with.

I hope you enjoy this new series which is on display and represented by the JoAnne Artman Gallery until February 18th. It is showing in New York City (Chelsea).

Very limited editions. Each print is offered at 42×42 inches with an edition of 2, and 8×8 inches with an edition of 3.

You may contact the gallery for purchase requests. Each print has been proofed, signed, and numbered by me, and comes with a certificate of authenticity.

—

Photographed with a Sony a7ii and a 25mm Zeiss lens.

Model: Ana Clue

Assistance: Kelly McGrady