Test Trips: this new work continues an ongoing exploration of the materiality of paper, and a more general interest in the meaning of materials. My focus turned to the essential characteristics, inherent materiality, and ephemeral nature of photography. In a fundamental way, this work reflects upon the positive and negative relationships inherent in photography, the play of light and shadow on a sensitized surface. Yet, the clearly defined steps between the tones resist the analogue nature of continuous tone silver gelatin paper; oddly enough, the gradients are reduced to a more stair-stepped, digital form of representation. Each unique photogram may start out as either paper-base white or maximum-density black by simply turning it upside-down. Starting at one end of the spectrum the tones incrementally go to the opposite extreme, and then back again in endless variation. In this world everything is reversed, opposites prevail, and positive and negative have many associations and multiple meanings. The prints in this series, individually and collectively, function as records of actions performed with the absence and abundance of light, as well as testaments to the passage of time.

Art as Paper as Potential: Giving/Receiving: this project takes 365 blank sheets of white paper as source material, one for each day of the year. In some respects, this project was a means to simplify my practice as an artist and photographer down to the least common denominator, that is, to focus my attention on blank sheets of paper. The choice of standard, letter-size sheets of paper allows the work to address more than visual art, due to its ubiquitous nature. This work may be viewed relative to many anonymous artists—past, present, and future—who were, are, and will be faced with the prospect of filling the equivalent of blank sheets of paper day after day. For some artists, this stark emptiness is terrifying and stifling, but I have come to view these blank sheets of paper as sites of potential. In this respect, these blank slates may not be empty after all; they may be misleading, in the same way that an exposed, yet undeveloped sheet of photographic paper can seem empty when viewed under a safelight, when it in fact contains a latent image, or in the way that an erased chalk board may appear as if nothing has ever been written upon it.

Cover to Cover: this body of work that takes as its subject the edges of art magazines—carriers of information and advertisements. The images were created by rolling-up art magazines so that the pages slightly separate, scanning the edges of the pages on a flatbed scanner, and then outputting the resulting fragmented bands of color and text as digital pigment prints. These austere linear abstractions are the unintended consequence of carefully designed documents, the byproduct of a painstakingly controlled internal organization. This work calls attention to the packaging of a particular kind of information and its circulation in the world. Only a sliver of the content contained in these magazines is visible—a small cross-section of images among a plethora of other visual and textual data. Context is alluded to in the titles, but is not completely evident in the prints themselves. Ultimately these images are about the re-presentation of bound reproductions of contemporary art and culture. The fortuitous patterns in these prints are messages initially controlled by the medium; meanings further conflated and conflicted though my alteration, translation and presentation.