Between 2006 and 2010 I made eight trips to the three Mideast simulations in the US run by the US military; during five of those visits I was part of the simulation and roleplayed the part of an embedded photojournalist.
Edge of Warfare - These photographs are concerned with how the military maintains an approximate simulation of the Mideast in patches of land in the Mojave desert far bigger than the scope of the simulation itself.
Field Work - taken at night with high-speed film, the photos show daily life in the simulations.
Outside the Wire - The title phrase means leaving the confines of the Forward Operating Bases where troops live, and these photos are from various off-base missions to villages.
Unfinished Villages - at Fort Polk in Louisiana I photographed an entirely new Mideastern village not yet inhabited for the purposes of simulation.
The End - the last of my military work, photos taken at the inactive simulation at the Marines Base at 29 Palms.
Actors and Props - Photos of civilian amputee actors who play injured soldiers for exercises in the simulation.
Erased Archive - discarded material from the CalArts archive of the 1960s and ‘70s, with all of the text digitally erased leaving only the decay of the paper.
Heavy Metal Horror Show - scanned book covers of old horror paperbacks from which all information was removed but the title, sitting in a black field like a heavy metal band logo.
Los Angeles, I'm Yours - a sort of ambivalent love letter to LA, made by writing or drawing on medium format color film negatives (shot in LA) with a Sharpie marker and scanning the results. There are several dozen of these.
Misc. Text Work - individual works that all feature text as the central object. Text plays a large role in much of my work.
How to Do Things with Men - my longest-running project, a series of portraits of men in suits in their domestic environments to explore the tension between pose, wardrobe and setting.
Noncompliance - a loosely thematic collection of samples from larger bodies of work that deal with social and bodily control (and lack of control).
The Blueprint - cyanotypes made of plans sent to me by a stranger about how to build a pillory, to which other text and drawing was added.
Pop Songs - many photographs of letters forming pop song lyrics were tiled together for these large pieces dealing with the shared/private nature of sometimes oblique lyrics.
Rorschach Butterflies - colored pencil drawings using butterfly stencils were digitally manipulated to form “inkblots” as part of a larger body of work dealing with the subjectivity of medical evaluation.
Interventions - flat Photoshop colors were laid in a grid pattern over square scans of curled acrylic paintings in an investigation of color theory and of photography as documentation of and replacement for painting.
Erased Landscapes - found photos of rainforests printed out at 4x6" on a desktop printer and leeched of ink with water and cleaning solution.
Escapology - documentation of the first of three performances for which I replicated a Houdini rope escape over and over again until I became too exhausted to untie myself and the crowd learned more by trial and error about how to tie me up.
Half a World Away - in-camera flaws, light burns and repetition were used in long landscapes as a performative attempt to replicate the slippery nature of memory in a medium that fixes memory at single instants.