Evidence & Fiction

My work uses constructed portraiture to examine the uneasy fictions of American normalcy and the silences that dwell within them. For more than two decades, I have compulsively photographed the white, middle-American family I was born into — and the family systems that have extended from it — from an outsider-insider position: implicated in the world I picture, but never fully absorbed by it. This contradiction drives the work.

I manufacture the stereotypically ideal American family in its beautiful environs, drawing from family portraiture, domestic ritual, advertising, cinema, and inherited ideas of respectability. My subjects appear composed, polished, and fixed in place, yet the scenes remain charged. I give them a wide frame in which to take up space; they remain rigid and confined. Gesture, posture, clothing, and architecture reveal the roles people are asked to inhabit.

My process involves staging, directing, and piecing together multiple frames into a cohesive but unstable whole. The portrait becomes both evidence and fiction — a record of actual people and a constructed image of belonging, inheritance, and control. I am building the very fantasy I am taking apart.

As a gender-nonconforming butch dyke, I am not outside that fantasy. I am shaped by the same family systems, visual codes, and cultural desires that I critique. I am seduced by the very images I construct — by their beauty, order, and promise of coherence — even as I expose the pressure required to maintain them. Beneath the surface are learned vigilance, buried histories, and recognitions that arrive before language.

The work asks what a family portrait protects, what it suppresses, and what becomes visible when the seams of the performance begin to show.