My current body of work is titled “At War With Words”. This body of work is based on my ideas about re-contextualizing a restructuring of my own childhood domestic situation through the themes of identity and memory. I was fascinated at a very young age with television. As one of the first children to have television be my babysitter; I was obsessed by its visual power. I was intrigued by the ability of television to communicate social, cultural, and personal ideals to the viewer. On television, I found my first friends. I can remember a specific childhood memory where I was watching a television program and my mother asked me to take out the garbage, and I ask my mother to wait a minute; I would take the garbage out after the commercial break. So I knew I was very influenced and fascinated by this idea of storytelling through this medium of advertising. Visual language and visual learning has inherently come very natural to me and has always felt like an extra extremity I could hold up against the world for protection.
In many areas of my work, I look at my own social and cultural situations and the ideas of what it is to be a man in 21st Century society. As well as investigating what it was like to grow up as a young man in the terms of latter 20th Century society and how those two ideas might be in conflict. And through my interests in art, poetry, nature, science, history, and philosophy, I investigate these areas. These things that I have an interest in make their way into the work through osmosis, subconscious means or through a direct connection, implementation, and representation.
At War With Words, is my attempt to reconcile my visual nature with my inability to grasp the structure of the English language as it relates to the printed word. I have always viewed words differently. I enjoyed reading from the back of the book or the back of a magazine. I’ve always looked to structure and form words differently. So in this place or space of misunderstanding or misrepresentation, I felt as though words were a tool others could use against me.
Being a creative thinker this is a struggle I've had to endure in silence. It was this idea of a dark secret never to be exposed to the light. The basic cobbling of sentence structure that most 10th graders understood, I found extremely difficult to grasp. I have always excelled at reading and been a competent and qualified speaker, but I often misconstrued the structure of words inadvertently or intentionally so I nurtured this passion with how their complexity and sometimes-multifaceted meanings could be oratorical or visually reconfigured.
How in its different terms of enunciating language or viewing language I found visual literacy and comfort. So it is in this place the work stems from. It’s my attempt to embrace this schism and embark on a way of empowering myself with the use of language and with the use of words that I might be struggling with to convey meaning or to come to some understanding with myself about how I’ve spent my life dealing with this. I have found through the exercise of creating these new works; the second component of meaning has emerged as a force of communication. With “At War With Words” it has become very apparent in current cultural and social forums we have a very divisive way of intellectualizing and contextualizing the use of language. Presently we communicate in media-friendly sound bites. The language that is being packaged and presented much like the visuals of my childhood have become culturally and socially divisive and dismissive.
So I’m attempting to gain and empower myself with the idea of words and using the language that we are utilizing in our present societal state as a weapon against those who would continue to perpetrate using words to punish, put-down, humiliate or belittle people. I’m taking this opportunity to say not only am I taking words and empowering myself with them but I’m taking the words and attempting to empower the people who think that they are the marginalized voices that have yet to be heard.
27 Hotel Rooms is a photographic essay, a collection of stories retrieved from the Internet, stories of hotel rooms that hold some significance socially, culturally, or historically. These fictional reconstructions of physical spaces that may collectively hold some echo of hubris and trauma long dormant in the psychological confines of their original structure. This body of work investigates the ideas of relationship, loss and scale.
The title for the work is derived from my imaginary dialog with two culturally relevant twentieth century icons, one real and one fictional. First being Ed Ruscha who created a seminal body of work in the Sixties titled “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” and the second, Nigel Tufnel guitarist from the Fictional Eighties hair band, Spinal Tap, that has been forever placed in our media saturated subconscious. So in a game of one-upmanship, I decided to create twenty-seven fictional spaces in response to Rucha’s twenty-six and Nigel’s guitar amp that had a maximum output of “11”.
The idea of expanding the temporal and spatial boundaries that are inherent in the medium of photography is what interests me. As I work creating spaces that incorporate the language of architecture and the architectural model, it allows the viewer to investigate the relationship between open and closed spaces and the idea of site geometries, histories and unseen traces.
The stories are my jumping off point to creating these visual spaces. The models are built in relative scale based on the single point of perspective of the camera position, lens choice, and photographed with a 4X5 view camera with a traditional landscape format. This technique allows the viewer to experience these spaces in cinematic context, where the scale and proportions of the photographs themselves command their own presence.
According to Jean Baudrillard’s order of the Simulacra; Reality itself has begun merely to imitate the model, which now precedes and determines the real world. Media is determining what we think reality should be.
Car maker John DeLorean was set up and videotaped by the FBI in a cocaine sting operation.....As for how they taped the transaction, the video camera had been placed inside a gutted out television.
Televangelist Jim Baker was caught after having illicit sex with a church secretary named Jessica Hahn.
Her toothbrush was still in a jar by the sink. Her hairbrush had what looked like a dark blond hair in the combs. Outside on the porch her bathing suit hung on a clothesline. Situated on another closet shelf was a book written in Swedish and a breakfast coupon for the Seagull Andaman Hotel. The date stamped on the coupon was 27 DEC 2004. Katrina Hallgren was most likely having breakfast when the infamous Tsunami hit....
This sensational story broke across the top of the Star tabloid hours before President Clinton as scheduled to accept his nomination as the Democratic candidate at the party convention in Chicago. Sherry Rowlands, a 200-dollar an hour prostitute alleged she had a high profile political client that among other things enjoyed sucking her toes. Rowlands claimed her client was Clinton advisor Dick Morris....A photo of Morris and Rowlands being amorous on the balcony of his hotel suite clinched the story.
On January 11, 2002, the sagging war-on-terrorism beat received a welcome jolt of news when federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced they had charged Abdallah Higazy with perjury after he denied owning a ground-to-air radio transceiver. The radio was found inside a locked safe, along with a Quran and a passport, in the hotel room where Higazy was staying on Sept. 11. The downtown hotel offers unobstructed views of the World Trade Center. Higazy, an Egyptian-born student doing graduate work in America, had been held as a material witness since Dec. 17. That’s when he went back to the hotel to pick up possessions he left behind on Sept. 11, the day all occupants were ordered to evacuate the building. The FBI confronted him about the radio, which was found by hotel personnel. Higazy denied it was his. But FBI interrogators, after three sets of interviews, finally got him to confess, and then charged him with perjury for his initial denial.
By February 1945, refugees fleeing westward before the on rushing Red Army had double Dresden's population. On the 13th of February 1945, 773 Avro Lancasters bombed Dresden. During the next two days the USAAF sent over 527 heavy bombers to follow up the RAF attack. Official figures issued by the new city government of Dresden, set up in the wake of the city's surrender to the Red Army indicate that 35,000 people, mostly woman, children and the elderly suffocated in the firestorm.
Jazz great Billie Holiday was busted here in a raid on Room #203. Holiday, then just 29, was in town for an engagement she was arrested for being in possession of opium. Holiday was eventually acquitted on June 3, 1949 after her defense team convinced the jury that she had been framed
Global outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The authors review the global outbreak of SARS, but the most interesting facet of the report concerns the epidemiology of transmission within Hotel M and secondarily in hospitals in 4 regions of the world. The initial cases were in Guangdong Province in South China. The index case in Hotel M, patient A, noted the onset of symptoms on 2/15/03. He traveled to Hong Kong to visit his family and stayed on the ninth floor of Hotel M on 2/21/03. He was hospitalized the next day in Hong Kong Hospital #2 and died 2/23/03. There were 12 other guests in Hotel M who then became cases in Hanoi, Iceland, Singapore, Toronto, and the United States, and 4 hospitals in Hong Kong. These 13 patients then became the source for at least 270 secondary cases in 8 widely disbursed geographic areas.
In less than an hour The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Will be assassinated standing on the balcony just outside the room next door.
It was here on September 18, 1973, that seminal country-rock musician Gram Parsons OD'd at the age of 26.
French conceptual artist Sophie Calle. L'Hotel 1981. Calle's controversial artist's book is the result of three weeks spent working as a chambermaid in a hotel in Venice in 1981. She tried to construct a narrative of the lives of the guest by examining, itemizing and photographing their personal belongings and the condition the room was left in.
Keith Moon, legendary drummer for "The Who" was known for his destructive outburst....Many of Moon's most outrageous antics occurred during the bands first American tour. On this occasion in 1967 Moon wanted to make a particular point about the definition of NOISE....SO he proceeded to blow up his hotel bathroom with a stick of Dynamite....
Federal judge declines to make FEMA continue funding hotel rooms. A federal judge Monday denied a motion to grant a temporary restraining order that would have stopped the eviction of 12,000 Hurricane Rita and Katrina evacuees from hotel rooms funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. April 6 2006.
D.C. Mayor Marion Barry arrested on cocaine charges in undercover FBI operation...Thursday Jan 18th 1990 8PM Barry was arrested on charges of possession of cocaine at the downtown Vista International Hotel.
SId Vicious, allegedly stabbed Nancy Spungen to death.
The Getaway
1972 PG 123 minutes
Master thief Carter "Doc" McCoy (Steve McQueen) gets bailed out of prison by his wife, Carol (Ali MacGraw), on the condition that the two pull off a bank heist for a corrupt politician (Ben Johnson). But Doc learns that things aren't on the level, and he and Carol escape with the loot. With nothing but the money and each other, Doc and Carol flee from a crew of criminals with vengeance on their mind. Sam Peckinpah directs this hit crime thriller.
Cast:
Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw, Ben Johnson, Sally Struthers, Al Lettieri
Director:
Genres:
Classics, Classic Thrillers, Action Classics, Crime Thrillers, Blu-ray, Warner Home Video
This movie is:
The New York Yankees were staying there, Lou Gehrig sought out manager Joe McCarthy for an urgent talk, Gehrig known as the Iron Horse had been struggling to hit the ball. Though he didn’t know it at the time he was loosing coordination because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the disease that would later bare his name. Sitting in McCarthy’s room, Gehrig said he wanted to bench himself that day, thus ending his consecutive game streak at 2,130 games.
Former Abu Ghraib prisoner Hajj Ali sits on his sofa in his hotel room. He was released from Abu Ghraib 16 months ago. He reaches for a pack of cigarettes with his right hand and uses his lips to extract a Marlboro. Then he starts up is laptop and calls up an Iraqi Web site, albasrah.net that shows the pictures from Abu Ghraib. He scrolls through the site pausing occasionally. He scrolls down to a picture of a man standing on a box wearing nothing but a black blanket, his upper body bent forward slightly, his arms attached to wires and a hood over his head. Hajj Ali is convinced that he is the man in this picture.
O.J Simpson check in and stayed for approximately two hours the morning of June 13th, just hours after his former wife Nichole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were found dead.
64 Days
This is for who is left to carry on.
A survivors guide to the end of life.
For the lack of any understanding or control I did the only thing I knew how to do. My whole life I have used my camera to observe, critique, hide and come to grips with my ultimate surroundings.
This is my documentation of the last 64 days of my fathers life and my attempt to grasp the entirety an finality of his passing and my effort to come to terms with it.
From the day he entered the emergency room with tremendous stomach pain, my father never returned to his home under his own power.
I received a phone call mid-afternoon while I was driving home, from a trauma surgeon that they were prepping my farther for immediate surgery.....
In Pursuit of a Father is my personal investigation into the question of nature versus nurture, love versus obligation. It is my story of tracing the steps backwards to the intersection of where my earliest recollections of family and father were first realized.
I am the product of two men, my biological father and my stepfather. My biological father extricated himself from my life before I even knew who he was. My stepfather stepped in shortly thereafter and has remained a constant male influence and father figure ever since. This project is my attempt to decipher photographically each man’s influence on my life.
No image of self can exist unless taken from the perspective outside us. So we are constantly reinforcing our vision of ourselves—our true “I”—in the reflections of others.
In the reflection of these two people, I’m actually looking for myself.
And in the reflection of these two men, my fathers, I am investigating their emotional, ethical and spiritual backgrounds in order to search for my own unique and individual place.
The foundation of this project was formulated in the set of pictures taken at 7050 Raritan Street, where the memory of my two fathers intersected in a moment of change. My earliest memories of my childhood are bound up in the rooms of that tiny brick house. All of them are filled only with the presence of my mother, and my two sisters.
I have no recollection of my biological father ever being in the home. He had been deployed to Vietnam in 1968 just before my second birthday and never returned to the house. My stepfather never lived with us in the house. When he married my mother the decision was made that we would move into his house with his two sons. So it was important that I take both fathers back to the original point of change and begin the project from the initial corner of emotional disconnect and work outward. The empty house functioned as a metaphor for one father’s physical absence in my life and one father’s emotional distance created between us. Trace memories of this space from my childhood continue to affect my relationship with these two men.
To me, the house has always been a space of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and misjudgments and missed opportunities. If I was truly to reshape my relationships with my fathers it was going to have to begin in this space of physical and emotional sparseness.
What interested me in creating this project was how photography functioned as a tool or bridge to bring my two fathers and myself together so we could create a shared experience. Regardless of the potential outcome of a visible record of the photographic experience, the physical act of taking pictures has been a valuable foundation for erecting the framework for a meaningful relationship with these two men.
multi screen video installation.
projected video installation.
From my ongoing series “At War With Words”
