ABOUT

After 4 years in Spain, I've recently relocated to the Boulder area of Colorado. Originally from St. Louis and Springfield, most of my adult years have been spent in California, first in San Francisco and then Los Angeles.

I graduated with a BFA in Theater, Performance & Lighting Design, with a minor in Creative Writing. I also attended many art classes, as well, and returned to school to study Photography at Santa Monica College from 2006-2008.

Initially, I worked in theater tech and then as a professional actor for several years, in television, independent film projects, commercials, and musical theater. During this time, I also cultivated skills with Photoshop and graphics programs and began to work as a production artist and designer. Highlights include the 2003 American Graphic Designer award for my collaborative work on educational materials for print and screen, work with Apple epubs, and DVD menu design for various New Line and BBC productions. Some of my favorite projects include the artwork for John's music albums, many of which have been derived from my photo art, work on the Miss Marple DVD series, and Walking with Dinosaurs motion menu artwork.

During my photo and design studies at Santa Monica College, I was exhibited in group shows at SMC and other emerging artists shows in Los Angeles, including a showing at The Jazz Bakery in Culver City.

In 2008 and 2009, I served as Producer for the PALM SPRINGS PHOTO FESTIVAL and left the festival to start my own photography business specializing in headshots for actors from a studio in downtown LA.

In 2014, as my husband and I were moving to Valencia, Spain, my mother was diagnosed with an aggressive brain cancer. I closed my business, taking only a few assignments for portraiture and design, to be able to help my mom through her illness. After her passing, I was not up to moving forward with previous plans for travel and photo projects. I did eventually re-engage by enlisting in a CELTA (ESL) certification course and began to teach English while we remained in Spain. And I eventually began to find inspiration to pick up the camera again after a long respite.

After moving back to the states in 2019, I am regaining my passion for creating and have also discovered a keen interest in gardening, enjoying once again a climate that has four full seasons!

thoughts on my art

While I am drawn to minimalism and abstraction, I also love to play with color and exploring composition. Concepts of identity and memory, as well as significance/insignificance - permanence/impermanence, seem to recur in my own refletions on my work.

Sometimes I feel compelled to capture moments that are really less about a moment in time and more about design and space - maybe space in time. While I focused entirely on capturing people and personalities to a specific purpose in my headshot business, my personal work tends toward objects, spaces, and framing to create a tension between reality and abstraction. I find that I avoid the presence of people and that when I do capture human subjects, I find ways to present them in context to the structures around them or to almost de-anthropomorphize. Looking back at what I shoot, I get a feeling of time-halted or being out of "time." I am drawn to objects and the intersections of things, or creating those intersections by flattening space, in many of my images; where there is a ghosting of humanity, where the hand of humans may be apparent, or even obvious, yet anonymous. Places and events merge as memory fails, reconstructing new memories. Or we are left with fragments of an imperfect recollection.

I enjoy working in both digital and film mediums. While I like the tension between abstract and discerning reality in the framing of my "accidental" photo works, I also enjoy working on complex constructions that rely heavily on photo manipulation and surreal presentations. Many of these images are in progress and I expect to have some ready for publication in the next year. I like the spontaneous work as much as I enjoy producing concept work. And I find that I need a variety of formats to work with in order to keep my mind engaged. I shoot with a variety of tools from digital SLRs, phone cameras, plastic cameras, pinholes occasionally, large and medium format film cameras and a vintage Yashica camera as well. However, given the limitations of my current residency, I rely mostly on my digital SLR, phone camera and a HOLGA for film, at the moment.

These are some of the themes that emerge for me as I review and share some of my libraries of images. I feel the need to organize and present as is usual yet I feel resistant to that process. I believe that some of my images cross series and relate to others...I don't want them to have to exist only in that one categorically defined space... One of my "anthology" ideas with string is to explore the idea of unending series as well as the collective, cumulative nature of artmaking, by asking photographers everywhere to use the same specs to discover their own entities to add to the anthology, as scientists add to catalogs of species.

I believe it may be that inspiration is as collectively created as it is individually done, especially given our extreme saturation of creative sensory material, which will only continue to accelerate with advancing technology. So much is absorbed by our subconscious, how much of what we can create is truly unique? Does it matter?We do not create in a vacuum. And so much of what photography does is to interpret or present people, animals, nature, or objects, and in so doing we are collaborators and would have few creations to show if others hadn't created before us, or chosen to put themselves in front of our lens.

I am also very interested in VR and AR and how this will change our experience with art and each other.