Artist Statement

For me, a diptych is a form of poetry that uses visual language to present ideas. By combining two discrete images into a diptych, I use this form to interrupt the seamless visual world that surrounds us and ask the viewer to refocus on the meaning of what they are seeing. Diptychs are inherently dynamic because they require the viewer’s gaze to shift back and forth from one image to another. Studying the two images together enables the viewer to go more deeply into each, resulting in unexpected insights and narratives.

I begin by selecting images that are in conversation with one another. My training as a Social Anthropologist has led me, as a photographer, to look for items shaped by culture and history to meet specific functional, symbolic, and aesthetic needs. In my portfolio, “Conversations: Diptychs of Japan,” these items signify social relationships and economic well-being on a continuum ranging from traditional to modern. They are fragments of history, objects that evidence a culture’s unique response to universal concerns.  

While the act of image selection and pairing reveals me, the artist, the act of image interpretation reveals the viewer, who becomes an active participant in establishing meaning.