Exhibition Statement
As a social practice artist, entrepreneur and community builder, I am interested in creating with a community as opposed to for an audience. My earliest social practice projects drew on my massive archive of photographs, which memorialize quiet moments within hectic New York City life that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.
In 2000, as a resident artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, I created an archive of all of my photos. I have taken pictures constantly since I was thirteen years old, so by that time in my life, I had over 200,000 photos. I had gotten into the habit of incessant photographing and never stopping to assess what I was taking. I wanted to see what I had been capturing for so many years. During a studio visit, the artist Mike Smith asked me if my archive was an art piece. I was forever changed.
At the time it was unusual for anyone other than a photographer to have that many photos of daily life taken over several decades. Today, though, we all have our own massive archives of photos. We have photographed everything from: food, moods, selfies and mundane scenes we want to remember. These photos exist on our screens and phones.