In March 2020 I left my home in upstate New York to be closer to family during quarantine. Away from my house and studio, I began walking and photographing the surrounding neighborhoods everyday, over and over again - an act that seemed to parallel the relentlessness that the pandemic brought to many aspects of our lives. During this time of heightened lines drawn around private and public spaces, I became engrossed in this in-between space - the exterior of homes, yards, plantings, fences, borders - all attempting to define space and privacy while also playing the role of nature in a system that everyone seemed to accept, understand and follow. The houses (and people) appeared to be trying to hide in plain sight. Things are both revealed and hidden. There is a constant back and forth between control and chaos - structures and nature being contained, but the edges are constantly fraying. I was encountering care and neglect, life and death, inside and outside, access and denial, foreground and background, real and fake, systems and irregularities - shelters, constructs, purpose and placement. How do we define, live in, shape, use and ignore the space around us? Realities shift and divide at the borders. These landscapes become simultaneously extreme and yet completely ordinary constructions of reality.
These photographs have become a way of marking time, space and place. They are surroundings, inside or out, through continued distancing and hospitalizations. This is a very small selection of thousands of photographs. This project continues still, though is not regularly updated online.
