It started in a grocery store.

For months I had been dreaming of this image. In my mind I saw a woman in it with long silvery hair. I looked into buying wigs but was holding out to find just the right person. I looked on local modeling and agency websites but just couldn’t find the perfect fit. Until…

I was grocery shopping in my small town store, perusing the veggies as I am fond of doing, when I looked up and saw a woman with the most perfect long, gray hair. I looked at my husband and without saying any of what I was thinking, he said, “YES”. I am such a shy person that I battled with myself for a moment before going over. I rehearsed what I would say and my face kept turning red, but eventually, with some gentle nudging, I walked over to my mystery silver-haired lady.

I introduced myself awkwardly as she looked a little bit confused. She was hesitant to take part in the series for good reason. Here I was – looking particularly hippie-ish that day – approaching a stranger in a grocery store to model for a fine art series I was creating. I didn’t even have any examples to show yet of what it would be. Heck, I wasn’t even sure if it would work out. But I took the leap, and gave her my information, and left without a yes or no. She said she would look at my website and get back to me.

A little while later a glowing email appeared in my inbox. She had written me. My mystery grocery store woman! And she said yes. She said she felt a connection to what I was doing and was happy to model for me. I told her we’d make it a special shoot on my birthday and I prepared to make sure everything was absolutely ready for her arrival.

Preparing for this image turned out to be a hilarious task. Step one was to find a bed, which I found fairly quickly online for a good price. The problem? It was too tall. So, myself, my husband, and my friend got to work sawing the legs off the bed so that it would sit lower to the ground.

Next, I had to find a mattress. I am two things: stubborn and frugal. So, not wanting to spend money and desiring an already yucky mattress, I opted for a mattress that had been thrown out behind a mattress store. It was filthy, disgusting, stinky, moldy…everything awful. And yes, I am entirely aware of how incredibly stupid it is to pick a mattress off the street. Nonetheless, I did it. And aside from spreading mold to the floors and walls and potentially contracting some unknown rash, I was fine. Feel free to strike that last sentence from your memory. I know my friend has, who was so opposed to this idea I thought she would throw herself from my moving car. She came around, though. Here is said friend actually laying on the mattress for a test shot. Oh, the things we do for friendship!

Once the bed and mattress were obtained it was time to get sand. I insisted that we drive to some sand dunes about 5 hours from my house. I wanted authentic sand. I wanted the real deal. I wanted to be able to say: I GATHERED THAT SAND WITH MY OWN TWO HANDS IN THE HOT DESERT SUN! So that is what I did, sort of.

When I got to the sand dunes temperatures were reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit. I get very sick in hot temperatures so I was already fading the moment we arrived. I couldn’t pull my car close to the dunes so we had to resort to walking up the dunes with trash bags and dragging them back to the car. This proved to be a physically taxing process, as the bags were very heavy and the sun was very hot. We were burning fast.

After about eight trash bags full of sand I decided I had reached my limit, and I left feeling slightly defeated. The day, however, was memorable and amazingly fun. I will never forget the onlookers thinking we were bonkers for trying to drag sand back to my car.

The rest of the sand I got from my favorite store (NOT) – Home Depot. All together it totaled 800lbs of sand. I reserved my beautiful sand dune sand for the top layer so that it would look yellow and smooth compared to the manufactured stuff. It was important to me that the sand be authentic because that sand came from hundreds upon thousands of years of breakdown and decay. I loved the idea that it would be even more held in history through a photograph.

It also served to further the idea of the image – time passing yet feeling trapped in it as well. It moves so quickly, and yet we are held in place by the fear of missing something. The spine – a whole other story in itself – was placed to show the decay that happens to us all, and to everything. The rotting bed was being taken over by death. The long, silvery hair that I so longed for helped to tell the story of a person who has been so stagnant that even her hair is growing into the scene.

I got asked many times at the Fourth Wall show opening if I manipulated the model’s hair to have a blue cast. I did not. Because of the color balance of the sand, anything neutral, including the walls and mattress, naturally had a blue hue to them even though they were all gray. I loved the effect and kept it in the final image.

When the day to shoot came, it was a beautiful one. The sun was shining, it was warm out, and my beautiful grocery store model even brought me hand crafted jewelry for my birthday. Since the setup was finished when she arrived we got to work shooting, which was faster than the first image in the series, and before I knew it I had my birthday wish – an image that I loved. I found it so fitting that I should shoot this image about time passing on my 29th birthday.

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: SLC

Assistance: Kelly McGrady

At the end of 2015 I had a portfolio review where I was told I wasn’t a serious artist whose work isn’t cohesive enough and who wasn’t the type that would be given a show in NYC. I spent the entire next year doing my best to prove that theory wrong while discovering parts of my creativity I didn’t know existed. I came up with a layered series that spoke to many different emotions through symbolism and visual cues. I worked really hard, physically, to build sets and to create viscerally. I wanted to do something different and unexpected.

That show opened on January 5th in New York City, my first solo show in this amazing art market. It marked a moment in my career that I didn’t see coming but longed for. I know that status and prestige isn’t what I’m after, but it felt good to work toward a goal and see it come to fruition.

The show is titled “Fourth Wall”, based on the film theory that catches a movie breaking the barrier between viewer and creator. This can happen when an actor looks at the camera or speaks directly to the viewer, or in many other ways. In my case, while no eye contact was made, I wanted my viewers to voyueristically peer into the lives of others. Fourth wall has dual meaning here, also pointing to the four walls, with no windows and doors, that features in each image.

I shot each image through a different Kodak Duaflex II camera so that the texture on each one was natural from a different lens, symbolizing the different psyche we were looking into. Each room represents the inner-workings of the person inside: what we feel we cannot share. What we keep inside.

The project was hands-on, much more so than any previous works. For the image with yarn I spent 60+ hours laying the yarn down on the floor line by line, and even asked the model to sew under the top layer of her skin to mimic the pattern on the floor. For another, I obtained 800lbs of sand, 100lbs of which was from sand dunes 5 hours from my home so that it would look better but also be symbolic of real time passing on the dunes. For the final image I photographed, myself and a small team disassembled the entire room and re-built it outside in a swimming pool to create the underwater effect.

Those are some examples of how I wanted to work in camera. These images have far, far less post production than my previous works, mostly using Photoshop to straighten lines and enhance colors.

From feeling trapped in your own skin to giving so much to others that you have no blood left for yourself, these images are a look at what we don’t tell people. They are a glimpse into the world of someone else who feels just as trapped and alone at times as we all do. Particularly in an age when we are more connected than ever, we find ourselves disconnected in the ways that give us heart and spirit.

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.

I will be sharing more in depth posts on each image in the coming weeks, but for now, here are all of the images together.

One year ago I attended my very first portfolio review event so that I could have my portfolio critiqued by five different professionals in the photography and art world. I had no idea what to expect, no pre-conceived notions of how it would go or how it should go. I was looking for unbiased answers to the question of how my art is perceived. I can’t say that I got unbiased answers, but I did get some advice that stuck with me in a big way. I heard everything from “never change what you do” and “trust your gut” to “if you want to be a professional in this industry, you have to change almost everything”. It was a confusing day to say the least.

What I left with was a few amazing, albeit hard to hear, tips about the fine art world. I was told that if I wanted to climb my way up I would need to produce a series, focus on concept, and revamp my style. A couple of weeks later I spoke with one of my gallery reps and she echoed those sentiments. It started me thinking in a new way and triggered the conception of a new series that I would go on to produce from December 2015 until September 2016. I worked in a drastically different way to how I had before. I used my hands, got dirty, took hundreds of hours total to make sets, and thought about the concept like an onion with lots of moving parts.

When I was in that portfolio review, I remember this overwhelming sense of defeat. The words that one woman told me were vibrantly negative – that I had a slim chance of showing in NYC, that my work is meaningless, and so on. I don’t say that so you feel bad for me; quite the opposite. I have grown a thick skin to words like those. I tell you this because it sparked something in me to do better, to be more, and to strive for what I could not yet see. I didn’t take most of the advice from those portfolio reviews, but what I did take has been instrumental in my growth this past year.

Like many people, I often view myself as the underdog. I never expect good things. I am constantly surprised by success, which is why I am able to see the smallest good moments as big boons. I grew up never being the best at anything I attempted. I was below average in school, always made the “B” sports teams, and every time I tried art my sister was overwhelmingly better. My career thus far and the last week has taught me so many lessons in what it means to try and fail. The biggest lesson is this: if you try and fail so many times, you are bound to finally succeed. The biggest reason most people ultimately do not succeed in their desires is because they put an arbitrary timeline on when they can achieve success.

I finished my new series and my gallery really liked it. They agreed to give me a solo show in Chelsea in NYC in January. I entered it into some award competitions, and today I was told that the series took 1st place in the Fine Art category and was the Grand Prize winner overall at the ND Awards.

These things don’t happen to me. That is the narrative I’ve had in my head my whole life. I’m not good at anything. I lack natural talent. I’m unlucky. This is what I tell myself so that I don’t feel as bad for not achieving what others around me have achieved. Today I stop that narrative. Today I stop telling myself that story and start telling myself a new one. And that story is this.

I am successful at what I do not because of accolades but because I wake up every day and show up to work.

I am successful at what I do because I have a message and I create to help others.

I am successful at what I do because I try so damn hard.

I am successful at what I do because I do it with passion.

That is my story. And I hope you will adopt it as your story, too. This year has taught me a lot about the importance of trust. I came out of my portfolio reviews with self-hatred twisting through my body. I was angry at myself. I felt I hadn’t tried hard enough. I let a reviewer tear me down and I felt myself believing every word she said. But after a few hours of sitting with the idea that what I love to do might not be good enough, I finally asked myself an all-important question: Good enough for who?

I got to work creating images that were good enough for me. Concepts that were good enough for me. A new way of creating that fit in with what I wanted to do. And this time, life saw fit to smile upon the effort. I know it won’t always turn out like that. I won’t always get that coveted solo show or a big prize. But today I hope that it is proof to you that if you stick with your dreams, you might just find yourself where you want to be. It won’t happen every time. Never expect it to. But it might happen when you least expect it.

If you are reading this and thinking that I’m different from you somehow, please don’t. I don’t come from money to create my images, I don’t cultivate contacts in the industry and I stubbornly refuse to mill about social gatherings to make impressions with “important people”. I create and I hope that it impacts as many people as possible. Take your unique gift and keep working at it. Work hard at it. Show up to do the work. Chances are, it will pay off.

What stories do you tell yourself, and how are you changing them?

—

Thank you to ND Awards for granting me the honor of Photographer of the Year 2016, it is a true honor that has taken me entirely by surprise. (I’m not the type that wins things…but I’m trying to change that story.) Check out the other winners and entries!

Thank you to JoAnne Artman Gallery, who will have my new series, Fourth Wall, on display in NYC next year. More details to come.

Finally, I will be sharing the series that won the award with you in the next month or so!