Anything Worth Doing

Anything Worth Doing (working title) is an ongoing body of work that tries to align an emotional experience with a geographic one. Looking at family trajectories, emotional entanglement and divergent paths.

I am from the west.  I moved around a lot until I didn’t. Now, instead of the Pacific at hand, it’s the Atlantic.  I used to photograph to extricate myself from situations. I used to be closed off, flighty, scared.  I got sober and the world unfolded with only benevolence.  I picked up the camera again.  I looked backward and began to understand progression.  Every image is now a tether, is now an opening, and my life gets wider.  There’s a lot I didn’t pay attention to all those years, and I’d like to walk that back.  I didn’t put a lot of weight on the idea of home, but now I’d like to build one out of images because I can feel its weight. I lost a friend and gained a sense of urgency different from the one we may have recognized in each other that kept us moving. I’m making work to reclaim what I lost or never had to begin with; full circles, a new elegiac language for love and longing, lifting up rocks, holding a steady gaze, fighting speed and rejecting quick appraisals, not knowing. I want to see it all again with new eyes and new grace.  To reconfigure the narratives I watched myself play out throughout early adulthood and the elements of flight and return that run through my family history.  To give weight to the areas I moved through, and to acknowledge how easily things could have shifted.