In my work, I use portraiture as a vehicle for creating a series of personal vignettes. Always formal, and often theatrical, each portrait serves as an assertion of a state of being. They are artificial moments, certainly, but are invented in support of very real sentiments. I am constantly examining human relationships through these devised images; assigning roles, removing context, arranging objects, and offering it all up for reinterpretation. By employing metaphor and my own sense of visual symbolism, I develop a “poetic description” of the kind of presence I wish to convey. Rather than set out to reveal a complete narrative, which demands a literal translation, I suggest a mood–something that can be understood on different levels by different people. Thus my concept is distilled and the work speaks not only to my own, but to the human experience.
