Walking, looking and responding viscerally and emotionally to urban construction and demolition, to architectural details, to spaces within and around buildings — this is my core subject. My work is foremost a kind of experiential reportage, a ‘derive’ with the digital camera as a sensor that captures, dissects, and rebuilds the imagery of the urban environment in a way that is analogous to the dislocations and disruptions of the personal experience. Techniques of cropping, image density/transparency, layering, inversion and distortion reinvigorate a banal architectural vocabulary with a new semiotic energy. The resulting imagery I produce suggest a metaphorical dimension somewhere at the intersection of a geometrical folly, a digital-constructivist fantasy and a virtual ruin of an idea unbuilt somewhere in ‘the cloud’. As social commentary, my work responds to the overwhelming recurrence of urban rebuilding in our era by posing a philosophical-political question: how is our sensibility affected when the energy, intensity and the mutability of ‘outside’ slips inevitably through our senses to ‘inside’ our self-awareness? Can photo/graphic imagery positively express or reflect what may be felt as a symptom of internal disruption? What are the unconscious effects of design decisions, including the removal and remaking of existing architectures, within our civic spaces? Do such decisions encode a cultural mode of specific conformity, if not an abstract frame for behaviours permitted, prohibited or inconceivable?
