Welcome to the 2010 Baker Artist Awards.

About this Project

Since the thirteenth century, Latvia has only known two true periods of independence, from 1918-1940, and its current status as independent today. Years of political unrest left the country on staggering legs as it took its first steps as an independent nation in the early 90's. Everything about the landscape is a hodgepodge of reminders of the past: from sweeping blocks of Soviet-style housing, splits in ethnic population/national language, ruins of fallen military bases, or even public transportation. My interest with the nation, and it’s troubled political history, grew largely through an attempt to recover pieces of my grandmother’s past while she was in her final stages of life and coping with a case of Alzheimer’s that wiped most of her personal history from her memory.
Aided by a grant I managed to achieve as I graduated college, I traveled alone in the Baltics for roughly three months (with a focus in Latvia) during the summer of 2008. As my audience views each photograph, I ask that they consider how it would feel to live amongst skeletons and reminders of an occupying force, no matter how gentle the suggestion may appear. How things like language, separation in population, and architecture can all reinforce the perpetuating existence of the pain of struggle years after its political paperwork has seemingly wrapped itself up.

About this Project

About this Project

a work in progress

About this Project

various projects created for baltimore based bands

About this Project

Photography is a tool to reach out to other people. In the past, I have mainly used photography to tell someone else’s story, or document someone else’s life. In the fall of 2007 I felt I needed to turn the camera towards myself, and began photographing to address apprehension I felt towards the future.
These photographs grew out of a fear of wasting time and my own potential. As I began conducting these performative labors, they transformed into something more. I appear in all photographs, stressing the idea of a single person carrying out mundane tedious labor as an ongoing asset in their everyday life. I may appear tired in some images, though never exhausted to the point of ceasing. The therapeutic quality of labor, persistence in daily life/routine, and an interest in self-reliance and independence all became extremely important throughout the course of this work. These acts, I realized, were testimonies of my own ability. They took on a therapeutic and cathartic quality. As I continued, I realized this act was all I really had. This is what it is to be human, to persist through dissatisfaction, feeling the rhythm and magnitude of the very labor you are a part of. There may never be a final ideal, perhaps just this labor, and it’s ok to let go of the social pressure we feel to have one impressive destination at the end of our path.