= a bent path

For a while, there seemed to be a certain unease in the air. There were more and more strange images hovering about, trying to build odd worlds or make swifter, more potent promises. I suppose I felt some underlying need to rethink how we related to, read, and relied on what felt like deeper and deeper illusions. And it was the idea of ‘reframing’ that became vital in this search. But it needed to be something more than just another quiet invitation to “look more closely.”

I knew the seduction of these promises and appeals intimately well, from the insides of their making — images that were often made for mere approvals alone. They were meant to leave viewers largely passive, with little to do other than act or respond. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a strange underlying insult beneath much of it. Were we diminishing the roles we offered audiences, their attentions, and their ability to question? In reality, the capacity to discover the many hidden layers in symbols and meanings was often overlooked. Many of us just assumed that this was the proper way to frame all ‘seeing’ — as though it were in a greater service to all others.

In practice, the idea of ‘reframing’ became one of my own moving antidotes to all this. We do live by frames of belief in our ongoing, everyday lives. And finding ways of reimagining them became one small way of quietly interjecting — if only for my own wellbeing. The relationships between one and another, giving and taking, or parts and wholes — when used in symbols and thinking — could profoundly change how we experienced them. A small change in that arrangement could have large consequences for what we could find. Something that seemed uneventful within a single frame could become potent when it shifted to reveal the others surrounding it — frames that might otherwise go unnoticed. That became the foundation for the bends and shifts in my own practice as well.

It was about taking light and giving it back through mirrored projections. Or it was moving several cameras over the same scene across different moments in time and space. Or it was illuminating the worn crevices in our familiar landscapes. Or at the very least, it meant finding atmosphere in the spaces we often blindly walked past thousands of times in our daily routines.

Somewhere along the way, fact and fiction, truths and tellings, or wants and worths began to blur — they needed to reflect off each other. The works grew from that very impulse. They asked viewers to edge into another way of seeing, where relationships were built, rather than just fixed and given. There was always room for more to happen, something no one part or piece could ever fully imagine alone.