My MFA thesis work, Reliquaries, is an ongoing series of handrendered photocopies. For this project, I mine flea markets, antique stores, eBay, and other sources for analogue snapshots that predate the introduction of digital cameras. The goal is to find anonymous images with unintentional effects such as photographic mistakes, film processing errors, or signs of damage/decay.

These photos physically embody both preservation and loss, and they locate unique sites of conflict between realism and abstraction, remembering and forgetting. By painting these artifacts exactly as I find them, I hope to contain, scrutinize, and venerate the imperfections of human memory.

Because I am roughly the same age as the Internet and digital camera, I grew up during our cultural shift into a virtualized world. As an artist, I feel challenged to trace the effects of our strange slippage into technological reality and to study the conflict between hanging on and letting go.