I was raised by good people in Canada, which is full of them. After art school my father joked, “I like your work, son, but I don’t know how it’s gonna help you in the insurance business.” Years later, at thirty-four, I found my birth family who were good people too, some of them artists. “That’s where you get it from,” my insurance agent father said, happy for me.
During my first phone call with my birthmom we discovered she was best friends with the couple two doors down from my childhood home—no small coincidence in a city of seven-hundred thousand people—and that she had even met my parents on several occasions, including at an annual block party. This was during the era of closed adoptions when no one knew who was who. They were all oblivious. After we hung up I scoured the family albums and there she was, sitting at a picnic table in front of our house wearing a white dress and smiling at the camera. In another photo, a ten-year-old me is lying on the left edge of the frame and my birthmother is in the distance on the right. If the camera moved half an inch in either direction one of us would have been gone from the frame, but my parents—who routinely cropped off heads in photos—had miraculously reunited us for that split second.
For a long time I didn’t know how any of this applied to my work. I see now that, while not exactly straight, the line is fairly traceable. Certainly worth mentioning. I mean, if I was born without a foot and went on to design a revolutionary new prosthetic, I probably wouldn’t leave the missing limb part out of my story. Somehow it seems relevant.
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I am a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores a range of themes (family, politics, the loss inherent in a divided and disaffected America) through photography, memoir, and song.
Originally from Canada, I immigrated to the U.S. as an adult and earned my BFA from Parsons. After a decade working as a graphic designer in San Francisco, I spent a year at The Maine Photographic Workshops (now Maine Media) before returning to New York to focus on photography full-time. I have participated in group shows, as well as a solo exhibition at The Maine Center for Contemporary Art, though in general my practice has involved (very) long-term projects which I am just now bringing into the light. In 2025 I participated in the Chico Reviews where I shared three of these projects for the first time. My book, One-Eighty, self-published in 2024, is now in many museum and research libraries, including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Art Institute of Chicago. I live and work between Hatfield MA and Brooklyn NY.