The Grid offers a subjective view of the urban environment. Built by hand from domestic items such as air filters, cheese graters and vases, the structures of this city are familiar and tangible while representing that which is so complex as to be unknowable.
While the first stage of the process is akin to sculpture, employing photography as the final medium allows me to precisely control how the items are perceived through lighting, perspective, and depth of field. Through these means I control how much items retain their common identity, and how much they transcend this to become delineators of space and architecture.
I am not interested in creating a painstaking, accurate replica of an environment. It is my hope that, by using ready-made objects, I raise questions about the personal and the public, the familiar and the alien, the masculine-coded city and the feminine-coded home, the crude hand-built approximation of a thing and the sleek impersonal (but still man-made) actuality of the thing.
Beyond the significance of the materials, I also investigate dynamics of the city in general. Specifically, that this complex, overwhelming, isolating system also holds within it promise, mystery, magic and hope.
