200540" x 32"Archival pigment print
Two young girls grow bored of homework. Wondering what is under the floor, they rip up the carpet and smash through the floorboards. The older girl looks on while her younger sister discovers a fertile new world, where ferns and ivy grow unseen. See the making of this work.
Featured on the cover of The Stranger, April 12-18, 2007, Vol. 16, No. 31.
My constructed-narrative photographs are nonlinear short stories. They focus on bizarrely adventurous young girls populating beautiful but uneasy worlds. To create these images, I draw from childhood fantasies and memories, then construct life-sized environments. By pushing these scenarios to an extreme conclusion, the girls become metaphors for our hyper-real childhood selves, where remembered emotions become stronger through time.
I’ve been asked why I go to such lengths - that is, why not simply photoshop an image together? Why travel to the woods to build a bedroom, or build a full split-level set? My reason hinges on how integral the building process becomes. Because these sets are so elaborate, the idea is concretely conceived before any construction begins. But through the building process elements evolve in ways I’d never have planned. Accidental details take on a meaning of their own; new connections between objects can’t help but emerge when standing in an open bedroom in a darkening spring forest.