Every artist has a horde of early work they abandon or destroy as they approach their “mature work”. For me, I generated the most juvenile art during my undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, and I destroyed almost all of it after graduation. I kept a few sketchbooks, a small box of prints, a binder of negatives, and one hard drive with my favorite project, in a folder marked Distortions, that I never quite cracked.
15 years later, I am curious to revisit my old work while I still remember what I was thinking and feeling. I was in the midst of a painful breakup, my parents were slowly going through a messy divorce, and I was feeling very contrary and experimental. I was thinking about how portraits are a collaboration between the sitter and artist, whether you could trust any images, and how far you could distort something beautiful into ugliness before it became beautiful again.
I was encouraged by two professors who gave me feedback I still remember. Martin Prekop, saw my first images and said “I like this, this is fucked up, chase this and see where it goes”, and Mark Perrot who said “Remember to be kind when you’re making pictures.”
These are some of the digital files I kept.
