Artist Statement

 

I have always been interested in photography and optics. As a career physicist, I specialize in studying how light interacts with materials and how one can learn about a material by the way it reflects or transmits light as a function of wavelength, direction, or polarization. As a photographic artist, I like to explore how lighting, color, and perspective affect how we perceive objects. I view the world with a unique sense of humor and, using my experience in physics and optics, try to put what I see in an interesting perspective. Viewing an object from a different vantage point gives us a different perspective, and often makes the object into something different than what we normally think of it as. Mixing two dissimilar and contrasting subjects in one image is a means to express drama, humor, and/or irony, and I like to explore this aspect of photography.

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A Different Form of Watercolor: I have been working with food dye, watercolor pigments, and water in glassware, and food dye and milk in shallow plates to create colorful and provocative works of art. These works are snapshots of moving creations driven by the diffusive forces of nature. 

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4π Panoramas: These are named after the surface area of the unit sphere and are ultra-wide panoramas that capture all of the directions about a single point in space. Different projections onto the two-dimensional print create new perspectives of the world. Mapping them onto geometric solids provides a new means for displaying these pieces.