Cleave (2025 - Present)

The images in this gallery are a short sequence selected from the ongoing project, "Cleave".

Cleave is an ongoing project composed of constructed photographs that explore the role of memory in shaping who I have become—as a man and as an individual—and the part I play in generating and intensifying those memories. The work reflects on the growing role of creativity not only in describing and reassembling memory, but also, inevitably, in creating it.

It began as an attempt to faithfully reconstruct childhood memories and states: sometimes to confront trauma, sometimes to understand why seemingly banal moments exert such power. Yet my memories have revealed themselves to be unreliable, highly suggestible, and at times entirely constructed. This realization has shifted the work towards encompassing an exploration of the very process of remembering, as well as deconstructing family and personal myths, questioning their origins, and probing why they came about.

In searching for myself through the creative act and this misremembered past, I am freed from the task of simply illustrating what I recall—there has been a natural evolution towards experimenting with transposition and transformation; memories and states are transferred to other role players, different timelines get combined, and discovered objects are explored for their resonance until they draw threads to specific memories and conditions, rather than the other way round. Found objects, toys, and constructed sets become stand ins for aspects under investigation, while photography itself provides a medium uniquely suited to straddling the real and the absurd, often compelling the viewer to decide where one ends and the other begins.

In this way, memory becomes less about replication and more about discovery, a way of opening the doors of possibility not only for myself, but also for the viewer.

Suture

Adult Conversations

The Chicken Sexer

Ambidextrous

The Box

Homunculus (Little Man)

Foundations

Scale and Size

Bolts of Hera (stereotypy)

Obsession

Adult Conversations 2

Juggling Potatoes