ze artist statement

for your reading pleasure, below is the text from the artist statement for "everything you want, everything you need" that I talked about on my podcast last week.

When I began to photograph the Fort Greene Brooklyn Flea in late Fall of 2008, I was most interested by what I saw as a giant collision of the past and present taking place there, by the idea of purchasing memories that once belonged to other people and through that transaction, making them our own, by our insatiable desire to possess objects of the past, by nostalgia.

And then there was the color, the light, the “stuff” of the market: the items for sale, the food, the clothes (and I’m not just talking about what was being sold, but what was being worn- it truly is a place to see and be seen). And what about those incredible accidental juxtapositions and arrangements? (think Jesus looking up to a socket plug like it’s his God, a $10 sticker slapped onto the forehead of a woman in a painting- she looks so surprised-!¬– a wood clamp placed just so over the…ehem…derrière of a vintage Hustler Magazine pinup girl. SQUEEZE!)

The Flea Market, especially the Brooklyn Flea, is an overwhelmingly tactile experience. Slip it on, turn it over, take a bite, fold, clasp, buckle, wind it up. With “everything you want, everything you need,” my hope is that you, the viewer, the visitor, will interact with my images from the Flea in a similar way. The act of looking at a photograph is all-to rarely an experience that fully engages the senses. Here, please do look at them but also put them together, shuffle them, try them on (and yes, buy them-!).

I’ve also endeavored to bring my own kind of temporal collision into this room you’re standing in right now; my images might be new but the View-Masters I sourced from all over the country aren’t. When was the last time you put together a puzzle? The playing cards might be freshly printed but don’t they remind you of those old ones grandpa might have had stashed away in his cigar box?

Enjoy…!