This is a collection of things, pieces, and physical ephemera. A pocket of ideas. This Place isn't streamline, it's a whirlwind of floating substances too abundant to fully appreciate or focus on. Some items are familiar, used or appraised as tokens of a certain time. Others are new. Unrecognizable and certainly belonged to someone else. I've been bombarded by this new material. All unexpectedly inherited. I have an unknown familiarity with this material, but don't know how to work around owning it. A bathmat, a swatch of grandma's fabric, and discarded bandages—what am I to do with all of this? 

I've noticed that objects get added here,  every day, but rarely get taken away. I've tried shipping these objects off to new homes, donating them to make space for something new. With each new heap that gets sent off, a new pile is discovered allowing for the process to fully repeat itself. 

The plaster salvaged from my falling ceiling after a big storm in the beginning of October. It wasn’t a monumental occasion, but became disastrous in the resulting image. Taking something ordinary like bits of wet plaster and retelling  the story more grandly.

This is all about construction. The things we are able to build in times of uncertainty. When given nothing but excess, I've begun to create something new from it. I've taken the stuff and made more stuff. Something more purposeful. The sets and landscapes are interpolations of reality—embezzling the story with tools used to decorate the fabric of our lives—embellishments that make us who we are. The sets utilize the raw material, the truth, of the object or event the scene is based off of, but turn it on its head to create something more beautiful, more digested and digestible. The spaces being created inherently are beautiful. Their aesthetics and physical presence draw people in. I think that may be the goal. We as humans recognize commodities and assets, and are drawn in. It's overwhelming, accounting for each section of the landscape. This Place has become too much, but it's now my job to deal with the mess I've inherited.

In examining some of these objects, I remember people that are no longer here. Holding their objects, looms a sense of gratitude and grounded sadness. They once held that red picture frame and decided to place it on their night stand. That object is now mine and I've moved it across the state to now live on my nightstand in this new Place. They aren't here with me, but they have become the picture inside the frame. 

If I had it my way this Place wouldn't exist. This environment of abundance began out of a rapid change. Something(s) that was never supposed to happen. 

When people die, they leave behind things and things and things. These things become other people’s focus to deconstruct and take care of. Their objects carry weights and seemingly nothing at all. They're just objects, but not—at the same time. Some hold more value based on their importance in a past life. Something made by someone, a quilt, a piece of pottery, or some other work of art are the winners of the bunch. They are important ones. It took someone to exist for them to exist. On the contrary, sometimes a tube of unused toothpaste is just unused toothpaste, even if someone made that too. 

Objects can be used as symbolic tools. We can make something in the likeness of someone else, with a meaning or a feeling that is tangential but powerful enough for us to submit to it. The image of nails flying in a made up desert-like landscape can become my grandmother Marilyn. In the image, we can become our items. A self portrait can be anything but your face. You are what others recognize you as.

The Home is the reason why this new space exists. It's the vessel that holds all of these various things and bits. It sits on the hill, collecting dust as it continues to exist without people, no family to occupy it. Just the pictures on the walls and the bins in the closets. The Home has yet to be deconstructed, picked apart and examined of its material and its guts. 

Today, as you're reading this very line, the home sits empty, unoccupied waiting for new life, new things to fill its walls. 

It's a therapeutic thing: use your loss and make something striking out of it. Give new meaning to the slow decomposition of a beloved personal landmark, and most of all, make your parents proud. 

The Home hasn't been the same since they left. It used to be cared for, rearranged monthly to bring new energy into the space. The plants were watered and the rooms were regularly painted. The objects hidden in the various rooms and closets were left there and forgotten. There was a liveness in the Home that cannot be recaptured anymore—not without them. And so it exists by itself with no one to rearrange or add new decorations. Instead, things are slowly being taken away and dispersed. What is a home without its furnishings and decor(um)?  Walls, windows, doors, and cabinets.

Use more material and grab a paper and a pen, write that memory down so you don't forget! All hope is restored until that piece of paper accidentally gets tossed in an unmarked heap of stuff, and ultimately gets lost.

I sense that this is just the beginning for me and my collected things. I'll linger here for what feels like forever. I may just devote my life to picking apart things and making objects into stars of a certain, unknown atmosphere. Dissect and examine, get closer to the people who are no longer here. 

As I sit here, detailing the journey of creating these images, I’m reminded that this act of creation was inevitable. No matter the troubles presented in the past couple of years—the people who are now gone—being here and doing what I do was always a part of the grand plan. 

Despite it all, after the photographs are made, there will always be unfinished business.