Center

MFA Student

Major: Photography

Graduation Year: 2020

Artist Statement:

Photography at its core is just the recording of time through the documentation of light. It’s taken me over twenty years to finally realize this, and to find ways of making that illustrate the power of photography’s foundations.

I enjoy challenging expectations, but my desire to find beauty in pattern often contradicts this. Pattern, after all, requires repetition, and repetition is the projection of the past into the future. This, too, is what defines expectations. Having lived in the Mississippi Delta for nearly fifty years I am conditioned by the echoes of atrocities absorbed in land shaped by enslaved workers. Disparity and racial strife linger in this region, and not a single person that spends time here is able to escape its weight. These are not patterns worth repeating. I’ve struggled to reconcile how I can love something and loathe it simultaneously. How do we break a pattern while finding beauty in its structure?

My work utilizes photographic principles to examine the role of individual gesture in shaping pattern. We never break fully from old ways, meanings, or even truths. We carry them with us and they can either become bouys of knowledge that propel us to better gestures or they can become nostalgic weights that hinder us from growth.

In order to find light, we need time.