Nearly every afternoon I rise from the comfort of my desk to the concrete tides of Midtown Manhattan. I witness streets of people masked by their unfulfilled desires; constrained to the bodies they drag around from one place to another. Their faces seem buried by their cold-calculated rites as they are dredged up from the trenches of a self-glorifying society.

 

With camera in hand, I begin to photograph what I see. I do this to remind myself of the countless times when I, too, was unwittingly caught in the routine of chasing progress and material gain. What I witness reminds me of Sidpa Bardo, the 3rd realm in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a sacred text that is meant to guide the deceased in their transition through the intermediate state. I reinforce this association by slowing down my shutter speed, liberating my subjects from their corporeal forms. I prioritize textual exploration over linear, didactic portraiture.

 

​As these forms become photographs, and the photographs become a project, I notice that the  same techniques that once defined my painting process now inform my photographic process.
The resulting work calls to mind both the tradition of experimental photography and Francis Bacon’s hazy grotesqueries. “Mirrors of our Mind-Bodies” examines a world in which our grasping minds make our bodies uninhabitable; these minds wander in a desolate purgatory—lost in the maze of commodified experiences.