My Bent Path

For a while, I found myself growing increasingly disillusioned, not knowing how to address the things I saw happening around me. I felt some need to rethink the ways we read and related to the images of our worlds. Or more clearly, it was about changing our relationships to the ways those images were made and consumed. And the idea of ‘reframing’ became vital in that pursuit. But it also needed to be more than just another quiet invitation to “look more closely.”

I knew the seduction of our images intimately well, from the insides of their making — imagery that was often made for mere approvals alone. It was often meant to leave viewers rather undisturbed, with little more to do than approve and move on. Still, I couldn’t help but feel an underlying insult lingering within all that. It was diminishing the roles we could offer audiences, their attentions, and their need to question. In reality, their capacity to discover hidden layers was largely being neglected. Often, we just assumed this was the proper way to frame all ‘seeing’ — as though it were somehow in service of all others.

In practice, the idea of ‘reframing’ became a powerful metaphor within all this. We do live by the ways we frame our ongoing, everyday lives. And finding ways of reseeing them was where I felt I could somehow, quietly intervene. The relationships between one and another, giving and taking, or parts and wholes — when used in symbols and thinking — could profoundly change how we experience them. A small change in that arrangement could have large consequences in the meanings that we might find. Something that seemed uneventful within a single frame could become potent when it shifted to reveal the other frames surrounding it — frames that might otherwise go unseen. That became the foundation for these bent and shifting works.

It was about taking light and giving it back through mirrored projections. Or it was moving several cameras over the same scene across different moments in time and space. Or it was illuminating the forgotten crevices and corners in our familiar landscapes. Or at the very least, it meant finding atmosphere and hidden qualities in the spaces we often walked past in our daily routines.

Still, I often felt these same issues rumbling about in everyday life. We seemed to be growing more accustomed to choosing only the most appealing versions of things beyond all others. And along the way, it seemed to weaken our fragile connections to truth and its still hidden faces. Approval was being offered like something to be deserved, even if we hadn’t yet considered what those approvals really offered.

This led to philosophy and mystery belonging together. The works grew from that same impulse. They asked viewers to edge into another way of seeing, where relationships were built, not given. That meant there was always room for more to happen, something neither of us could ever fully imagine alone. And this became the claim of the whole — it tried to change how an image was seen and the many layers of unseen meaning lingering around it.

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