The inclination to being endeared to an inanimate object is a central pull to my design and art practice. Focusing on the broader idea of anthropomorphizing, my work concentrates on the inescapable urge to model the built world after our own human and animal form. Seeing oneself in the built environment inspires an immediate feeling of intimacy and joy; this emotional reaction is one that I share strongly and invoke in my own work. Working primarily in wood, my formal language concentrates on a playful intersection between minimalism and familiarity. I explore the relationship that people form with the objects they use most frequently. My concentration on usable objects stems from the joy of seeing a piece being present in the everyday experience and how pieces are brought to life by tangible interactions with people.

I am interested in how we try to escape reality through our imaginations. This led me to an interest in world-building, that is, creating from entirely new fictional worlds, while recognizing that anything we create inherently references our experiences in reality. Like many artists, my artwork acknowledges my identity through expressed opinions, ideas, and work on topics like race, love, innocence, and identity. These are serious topics and that often show the vulgarity of placing stereotypes and negative characteristics on minority cultures.

I originally came to this project with the idea of creating a series of environmental portraits of the people who make the wine on your table. I wanted to showcase the craftsmanship that occurs over the course of a full year in the life of a winery, and to capture the grittiness and the physical work involved. I wanted to celebrate the people that make the magic happen behind the scenes. I had assumed that I had left my twenty-year software engineering career behind me, and was now embracing the life of a creative. However, as this photography project progressed, I frequently sought out scenes that had stronger “left-brain” elements: patterns, symmetry, reflection, repetition, precision, and geometry. In my previous career I used to find beauty in elegant analytical and mathematical solutions to complex problems, in precisely formatted source code, and in patterns in large datasets. I now see strong overlaps in what appeals to me aesthetically in different fields. Perhaps these worlds might not be so far apart after all? My first public photography exhibition also represents my personal transformation from software engineer to photographer. A transformation necessarily retains parts of the original. We are not replacing, we are taking what was there before and shaping it to a new purpose. Wine is a transformation of the grape, retaining elements as diverse as soil, aspect, and climate. Similarly, over the course of this residency, I have come to incorporate many aspects of my previous experience into my photography. As you view these pictures, I invite you to consider transformations in your own world, and to recognize and honor what those transformations contain that has gone before.