"I was born and raised in Columbus, Nebraska, in 1979. I received a BA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2004, with degrees in both Psychology and Art. In 2002 and 2003 I was awarded the UNL Creative Activities & Research Experiences Grant. I am also the recipient of the Jean R. Faulkner Memorial Award, the Gold Award from the Midwest Society for Photographic Education and the Richard Benson Prize. I am a 2008 graduate of the MFA program in Photography at the Yale University School of Art."
"In an attempt to make things clearer for myself,
I have been trying to figure out why exactly the work feels like it
does. But my understanding is slowly evolving and shifting, which is
making a clear definition difficult."
"Sometimes it feels like the fragments
of the distorted stories that I grew up listening to my father tell
- but then again, it also feels like an investigation into how neurosis
translates itself into gesture and body language; how my mother's distress
influences the particular manner in which she holds her dinner fork.
Sometimes it seems like it's trying
to deal with ideas of materiality - what things people love, and how
they love them; how they think they need them because of what they represent.
Sometimes it feels like it's about
the idea of how everything is connected and pulling on everything else,
or how destruction is just really transformation - where there is a
change in form but not in energy.
Sometimes it seems like it's dealing
with some kind of pseudo-faith and the false relief that is gained
through ritual; the strategies we've established to ease our souls through
habitual distraction.
And sometimes it's the feeling
of pure desperation in trying to communicate something that is outside
the senses; a hybrid moment of the indescribable personal, and the accessible
everyday - the failures and miracles of human perception.
It is kind of like
hearing a strange sound coming from another room that seems both at
once recognizable and unfamiliar.
It is the compulsion
to discover its source.
Although this pursuit may seem
to be inevitably elusive and fruitless, I am hoping to gain whatever
understanding I can through the process."