These are recent projects, series in progress and/or incomplete concepts.
Please contact me directly with any questions.
EXPERIMENTS WITH SURREALIST PORTRAITURE
Recent edits of photo session with Jean Nance (Toronto, February 2025)
With these images, I aim to explore surrealist portraiture with techniques reminiscent of those pioneered by Man Ray, Lee Miller and their contemporaries. My intent is to capture an ethereal ambiguity—a hallmark of surrealist photographic practice—using long exposures and tonal manipulations, especially solarization, a method Man Ray famously employed to invert reality and unsettle perception.
By exhibiting my subject as both present and ephemeral, I aim to create ghostly, uncertain figures that recall the mysterious quality of Man Ray's rayographs. These visual strategies challenge the traditional photographic notions of authenticity and immediacy, questioning how identity and temporality manifest through imagery. Likewise, the repeated layering of forms echoes the experiments of László Moholy-Nagy, who was fascinated by collisions of form, motion and abstraction. Long exposures create temporal layering and generate distortions of the human form (intentional blurring, visual duplication, etc.) ... leading to a sense of spatial and existential ambiguity.
These portraits are aesthetic experiments ... but they're also personal meditations on identity, transience, and perception ... I've been thinking about the many ways photography can go beyond merely documenting/observing reality. I believe photography's unique potential consists not simply in capturing and re-presenting aspects of the "external" world but, moreover, in transforming and reinventing what we perceive as “ultimately” real.
Tentative Title: "Ephemeral Bodies"
This is a story about an artist who, by means of her exquisite work, was able to find a gap in reality … and hence to conjure the Void. But here, she found a zone of chaos and instability, which, to her surprise, contained boundless potentiality. She had discovered a space within which seemingly spontaneous creation, ex nihilo, could take place … and so she immediately called forth her one true love, an impossible love for its truth and purity … and her one true love indeed came forth … she materialized, ex nihilo.
But the consequences were tragic. …. For, the Void, inevitably rescinds any thing made real by means of it …. and ultimately, the Void retracts within itself all that was once real.
This photographic series narrates the tale of an artist whose exquisite craftsmanship unlocked a fissure in reality, granting her access to the Void—a realm of chaos, instability, and infinite potentiality. Within this liminal space, creation from nothingness - the paradox of materialization ex nihilo - was included in the realm of the possible. Driven by loneliness and longing, she summoned forth her impossible love, defined by an idealized truth and purity. Miraculously, her beloved emerged, fully realized, from emptiness itself.
Yet, this miracle bore inevitable tragedy, for the Void permits no permanence. All that arises from it must, in time, succumb to dissolution, inexorably reclaimed by the Void from which it came.
Like Orpheus reclaiming Eurydice, their union defied nature and was doomed by inevitability. Echoing Clarice Lispector’s insight, the artist understands that in diving into the abyss, she ultimately discovered it within herself.
Tentative title: “Sacred Skin”
If the body is a sacred site, the vessel of human dignity and intrinsic worth … so, then, the skin is a sacred boundary … it marks the border of this hallowed bio-physical form. This is the threshold where we meet external reality as “external”, the boundary between self and other as “other” … but, at the same time, it’s the point at which we connect with and are rendered inescapably “in touch” with that other, and all possible Others … it’s where we encounter the universe that is also always already within.
“… The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed, it is neither seen nor touched - for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object … “
Levinas, Totality and Infinity
