Statement

My father drowned on the 4th of July, 1981. I was two years old at the time.

Although I was too young to remember it, that day has impacted almost every aspect of my life.

My creative work is deeply personal yet accessible in terms of identity and cultural structures regarding gender. Through the act of making images, I am continually exploring how my fatherless childhood was impacted by the unrealistic expectations of the media as I call into question the roll of masculinity in contemporary American culture. I rely on my personal experiences dealing with sensitivity, memory, loss, overcompensation, frustration, desire and the affects of media influence as key informants of my artistic practice. I consider myself an image-maker rather than an image-taker as the work I produce is a construction based on my personal and cultural identity. By examining my life thus far, I question what type of man I would have become if my father had lived. Would I have gotten the first hand experience and hands on life training that I assumed was a normal part of traditional father and son relationships that I had seen on television?

I am attempting to come to terms with these types of questions in my creative work. In a sense, I have employed my camera and a variety of digital image editing techniques as a means of therapy by undertaking a number of creative projects that explore the construction of personal and stereotypical structures of masculinity. These projects are intended to provide the viewer with something familiar as a point of entry. This point of entry may speak the language of the intimate family snapshot or a recognizable reference from popular culture. It is through this sense of familiarity that I hope the viewer can connect and discover that something is not what it seems, opening the work up to conversations about the nature of constructed relationships.

While a lot of the work that I am dealing with is rooted in my personal experience, I see it having a place in contemporary studies on masculinity. Like many others, my conceptions of ideal American masculinity were informed by fictional television and film characters. Shifting gender roles and cultural changes have caused scholars and theorists to break down these “ideal” types and explore other manifestations of male-ness. I have found inspiration in the critical and theoretical discourse that surrounds this struggle to grasp the meaning of contemporary masculinities. Through my work I am continually examining the ideology that has partially shaped my personal identity. Though this intensive examination I seek to reveal and critique the structures that taught me what it means to be a man in contemporary American culture.