STATEMENTS

MAYBE TOMORROW – PROJECT STATEMENT

“Maybe Tomorrow” is a long-term documentary project about my partner’s hometown in rural western Kentucky, a region shaped by overlapping assumptions, histories, and meanings for both those who live there and those looking in from outside. The work began from a desire to understand my partner Erik’s ambivalence about returning home after building a life with me in New York, and to understand how my own sense of belonging evolved within that return.

At first, I approached this place as an observer, aware of the distance between my own life and the rhythms of the town. Erik’s family largely welcomed me in, yet the space carried quiet boundaries—lines that shaped how I moved and what I could see. Over more than a decade, that distance has narrowed but never disappeared, and that tension has become the ground on which this project rests. What I initially recognized as ruin and economic decline has revealed layers of endurance: the persistence of daily routines, moments of tenderness, and the beauty of a landscape marked by slow change. It is also a place where the closeness of life and death is felt in subtle ways—in memory, in the passing of seasons, and in the stories that continue through those who remain. Within that awareness, I’ve come to find a sense of respite and respect: an understanding of how resilience, humor, and continuity sustain this community.

“Maybe Tomorrow” is a study of how place shapes identity and belonging, even as both shift over time. It traces the relationship between people and landscape, attending to the small, persistent details that define rural life and its quiet transformations. The project is a meditation on familiarity and distance, on what it means to return, and on how memory settles into the texture of a place. “Maybe Tomorrow” holds space for that slow accumulation, for the unresolved feelings that rise each time we go back, and for the possibility that understanding may never be complete, but can grow deeper with each return.

HIDDEN GLANCES – PROJECT STATEMENT

Hidden Glances is a series of photographs constructed from vintage gay pornographic calendars published between the years when I was beginning to recognize my sexuality as a youth until I came out.

Each image is an amalgam of two figures that originally appeared in the same calendar. In the top layer the male body has been spliced from his scene and the figureless image is laid on top of a second image. Through the negative space of the absent figure, a censured portion of the figure beneath is revealed. The construction is then photographed, thus bringing both layers onto the same seamless photographic plane. 

This compression of space, along with the duality of revealing and concealing, become a metaphor for the numerous years when my gaze upon other men was tentative and fleeting, fearful that those stolen glimpses would expose my homosexuality.

Furthermore, the photographs remove the source material from their original intention—that of gratuitous imagery for sexual stimulation. A new narrative is constructed in which the viewer is invited to consider how pornography can be used to inform more reflective conversations about the male body, the coming-out process, and the struggles that so many gay men and I have encountered. On a more universal level, the work explores themes of self-acceptance, shame, fear, and personal secrets.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a lens-based artist who works primarily on long-term projects focused on identity, gender, and memory. Understanding that image-making is inextricably linked to perception, I combine my background in documentary photography with my interest in subjectivity in order to connect personal perception and universal experience. For my series Hidden Glances, I repurpose gay pornographic calendars to trace my own period of life in the closet to create a new understanding of my history. In my ongoing lyrical documentary project Maybe Tomorrow, I photograph the hometown community of my partner in Greenville, KY. This open narrative explores how place instills and informs identity, mining the tensions of belonging or not belonging, with the continual and unspoken threat of exile for violating communal norms. My work explores the ways in which identities (and histories) are shaped, maintained, reinforced, and challenged.