2014 - 2018
This series began as a visual essay exploring configurations of "home," and the relationship between the temporary and permanent spaces that constitute home for various people, focusing specifically on Western New York. As images and research accumulated, my work became animated more and more by the inadequacy of all narrative or identity to account for our ties to location, to space. This is personal to me: the longer I live in Western New York, the more the relationship between people and environment becomes complicated, opaque to me even as someone whose home is here.
I find myself having little choice but to embrace the conflicting sensations of empathy and alienation in my encounters with people and environment and to create images that might convey as much. Bad Medicine is not a story. It is not a plea for authenticity or a proposition of unity. Rather it is an assertion that these notions poison sight and feeling alike.
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The title "Bad Medicine" is a reference to pharmakon, [in Greek)] a word indicating both "remedy" and "poison." It is also borrowed from a song of the same name.