The stencil is the main conceptual and material tool of my work. I began my artistic formation in darkroom photography, and the aperture remains a generative tool for me, with the view through a stencil on a screen as much as with a lens or a piece of film. Looking through a stencil from both sides, whether a simple silhouette or a complex halftone, inevitably frames other images and creates juxtapositions that drive my creativity. I often begin my image-making process with photographic archival material, tracing the outlines of an image, or taking apart an image into component layers and putting it back together again, simplified. I build a print by layering these stenciled historical components into a different formation, sometime altering a scene, or sometimes making something completely new. In doing this, I’m indicating that things could have been different—people have agency inside of systems—and, highlighting my intervention as a collaborator—that any artistic work with archival material is a collaboration between the material, its creator, the collector, and the artist.
My recent project Footage Record centers on the Owens-Illinois glass factory in Huntington, West Virginia, and uses photographs and oral histories from the KYOWVA (Kentucky/Ohio/West Virginia) Genealogy Society and Marshall University Special Collections. I wanted to explore how Owens-Illinois’ model of “industrial paternalism” relates to the family, gender, and ideas about what it means to be American. Through enlarging, shrinking, cutting, taping, and repeating, I shifted emphasis and created focal points in the original material, ultimately exposing screens with collaged, oiled, xerox copies. This decidedly analog print technique leaves cut edges, small gaps, and remnants of tape in the final image. While my work feels like a historical practice, I also want to question what history is as a project, with my interventions drawing attention to the way in which the story was originally told.
My art practice tends to involve repetitive tasks. To make the collagraphs that are part of my project on restrictive housing covenants (Said Owners, Said Lots), I letterpress-printed text from a covenant onto file folders, then cut each letter out by hand before recomposing words into positive and negative sections and adhering them onto a plate for printing. I view all of these repetitive motions as a kind of deep attention and homage: by passing found words or images over and over through my hand, I sit with the information in multiple emotional and mental registers, seeing the syntax anew, noticing tiny details in the background, observing what is missing, or imagining the subjectivities of the original photographer, photographic subject, writer, cartographer, donor, or archivist.
