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Human experience is plagued by an inherent incompleteness—both perception and memory being naturally imperfect, undeniably inexact. It is in our nature to yearn for completion, for narrative wholeness—to seek to fill in the gaps. Craving familiarity, we long to connect ourselves with other people through shared experience. Memories expressed by one person may reanimate long-forgotten details and events for others as their minds strive to forge these connections and to satisfy these voids. Each day consists of roughly twenty thousand moments—defined as the few seconds wherein the brain records an experience. Every such moment is subject to omission, misinterpretation, and imaginative embellishment, and likewise each subsequent recall of that moment is subject to repression, convolution, and dissipation.

Created through a process of editing, erasure, and exaggeration, these works allude to the intractable nature of remembrance, creating open-ended, implied narratives that invite a visceral response in a way that parallels storytelling—we often take a small fragment of someone else’s personal anecdote and re-form our own memory in reaction to its familiarity. We never take that person’s entire account and find our own experience to be identical, rather we are inspired by certain details which allow us to forge a connection between that person’s experience and our own related one. Likewise, we choose and appropriate certain aspects of other people’s images, and in turn we project our own memories back onto them. The simultaneous presence and absence within my work calls for this kind of interaction—the familiarity of the visible draws one in, but the polysemy of the invisible, the erased, the absent, impels one to provide a personal context for this moment—one that conforms to the summation of memory that forms his or her particular identity. In this way I seek to propel the viewer toward recovery of some forgotten bit of personal experience, a narrowing of some lacunal void.

I always feel an immense sense of victory when I suddenly remember something from my childhood—a tangible, almost physical sensation of information flowing like liquid back into a previously empty chasm in my memory. It is accompanied by a feeling that I’ve regained some small part of my identity that may otherwise have been lost forever. This sensation is something I hope to share through my work, creating a sort of visual archive of the kinds of shared situations and moments that interweave and overlap to make our experience human.