song of a mourning dove
2024, silver gelatin prints, inkjet prints, collage.
song of a mourning dove became a study of cold – a confrontation of what I find comforting. The death and austerity associated with a cold snap before the regrowth of spring is a phenomenon I have learned to find macabrely beautiful. My childhood home, as an emotional and physical landscape, was one of coldness. Winter was the longest season, and emotions were secondary, a hindrance to productivity and usefulness, true to the self-sacrificial lessons of Catholicism and the rigidity of the military.  Pinhole photography is a major element of this work. I use a camera I built myself, 5x7 silver gelatin paper to capture paper negative images, which I process, scan, and invert to print. Pinhole photography, having a lensless aperture, produces distorted, unfocused, but infinite-feeling images, an effect that feels dreamlike and dissociative, evoking the eye of an indirect observer.