Parallel Play

"Parallel Play" is a body of work that employs childhood playtime and utilizes humor as ways of demonstrating the absurdity of adulthood normality

"Parallel Play" is a body of work that employs childhood playtime and utilizes humor as ways of deconstructing tropes of masculine and heteronormative tradition.

When toddlers are not yet social, they commit to “parallel play.” They have blocks and trains, dolls and marbles, flowers and stones, and they create their imagined worlds next to each other, occasionally borrowing toys and shifting their utilities back and forth. When you look at my photos, the worlds you see are of your own imagination utilizing my characters, settings, scenes.

These parallel universes are stages for imagined souls to live, where their voices are heard in dialogue, where their actions affect the plot, create tension, conflict, resolution. Each photograph is an implication, one moment in a sequence of events that foregrounds the viewer.

The photos here represent alternate realities, a refracted view into worlds for characters and viewers alike to play in, the storm clouds of the adulthood gathering at the horizon. These photos hint at “the robust imagination of a child at play” in that they are, on surface, about childish things like puppets and forts and friends found in shadows and mirrors, but they hammer at the truth that “the imagination plays with you” because they evoke in the viewers an exploration of their own interiority and multitudes.