After relocating back to my hometown in 2021, I began revisiting the formative ritual of walking around the city with my camera and field recorder, much in the way that my creative practice first began.

As my work develops, I find myself drawn to the flatness of the image. The inaccessibility of place, its hermetic nature, the aggressiveness of the environment - all communicated through texture, depth of field, proximity, and the exaggeration of surface. The images function as a wall rather than a window.

My work contains multitudes of contradictions. While the project is confined to an area code’s boundary, the images can't be placed geographically. The tension between site-specificity and personal relationship is coupled with a desire to speak broadly on post-industrialism, restriction, and the fall of the American empire.

Surrealism and the uncanny are present in my work as well. Whether it be the murder of crows overhead, light that defies the gloomy weather, or the cryptic and often beautiful marks people make on the place, these moments feel miraculous and resilient in defiance of the testaments of time and confinement.

Working on this project has allowed me to consider my relationship with place, memory, and documentation. Through curiosity and criticality, I look forward to continuing to interrogate the contrasts between familiar and foreign, local and global, and tangible and surreal.