In 1985 I was the starting goalkeeper for the Junior Varsity soccer team. Like all the other sport teams, we practiced after school. Being 14, I relied on my parents to pick me up. On one particular day, my father had to work and my mother was busy with my two younger sisters, so my grandfather Ed was dispatched to retrieve me.

20 minutes after the end of practice, I still sat on the curb of the parking lot waiting. My grandfather rolled in not long after with a host of apologies. It turned out that he had gone to the wrong school, which on the surface is an honest mistake to make. But, this wasn’t the first time this had happened. It was one of a string of events and small changes to his personality that were noticed over time and it was after this that he finally received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

In the early-to-mid 80s, Alzheimer’s was still a new term in the lexicon of everyday life. Senile, forgetful, absent-minded…these were the ways dementia was described. I watched my grandfather decline over the next 10 years and watched my parents and my grandmother navigate the shifts in his personality, the paranoia, and the way his brain squeezed out any new memories in favor of continuous loop of past recollections. He began to regress into his young adult self, his adolescent self, and ultimately his childhood, believing every one around him was a member of his immediate family and he was communicating with them as vividly as when he was in fact a child.

These moments could only be described as hallucinations and they always caught his present-day loved ones by surprise. The seemingly coherent became twisted in the confinement of a declining mind.

Or was it? Could some sort of beauty be harvested from the segments? Could memories serve as a map, a document, an atlas to the long-forgotten charms. Was it possible that the disease, with its cruelty and corruption, was a strange documentarian, a chronicler of times long forgotten, moments of necessary excavation?

Documentia is a series of digital collages inspired by and in direct response to those recollective narratives. A body of work created in celebration of the dementia mind, freeing it from its human container and exploding it onto the walls of a gallery space; asking viewers to contemplate their own sense of memory, the personal way they organize the shards their own experiences and stories into novel constructions.

Gallery at the Kranzberg, 2022
John Burroughs School, 2022

Before embracing music, film, and a host of other media, I started my career as a metalsmith. Early on, I was drawn to the process of anodizing, the dying of metal’s surface. I used a variety of techniques to discover palettes hidden on the metal’s surface. What was initially gray, yielded blooms of surprising color—the metal’s invisible truth.

These prints are the manipulation of digital shapes and textures to produce similar results to my early experiments with metal. As a transplant to St. Louis, someone who has spent the last 18 years discovering this city’s invisible truths, I regard these prints as a metaphor for tempering future landscapes…looking for those surprising blooms of color.

'Schematics' is a series of large-scale prints that explores the interior life of the electronics we use daily. By layering and abstracting the images, we are asked to contemplate the inherit pattern and beauty at the heart of technology.