Take Your Time
2019-Perpetually under construction
In Take Your Time, I explore the ways trains connect worlds. In looking at the railroad’s vast and interconnected systems of travel, commerce, telecommunications, and information, I perceive trains as meaning-making-logic machines; a structural device that threads seemingly disparate worlds together.
Inspired by the train’s innate ability to signify time, order, and desire, I examine the philosophical relationship between collecting and obsession within the railfan community. Most common in retired males, lifelong obsessions with train watching and railroad modeling transform suburban spaces into scaled-down constructs of time and space. In this form of simulation, the disparate collapse into each other; work and play, fantasy and the real, the young and old, and the miniature and the large. These re-constructed spaces activate prolonged simulations of nostalgia, where the past, present, and future occupy space simultaneously in a seemingly endless loop of manipulation and control.
Take Your Time
Wayne State College
January 22nd-March 19th, 2025
In this iteration of Take Your Time, a plethora of photographic processes—gum bichromates, silver gelatins, cyanotypes, digital pigment prints, and artist books—converge in a diagrammatic constellation of disparate imagery. Aiming to reflect some of the complexities of contemporary experience, the work explores tensions between order and disorder, fantasy and the real, intentionality and error, comprehension and confusion, and fragmentation and unification––all amidst the search for meaning in our temporally challenged world.
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Take Your Time
Criss Library, University of Nebraska-Omaha
August 26th-November 7th, 2025
This iteration of Take Your Time aims to reflect some of the complexities of contemporary experience. In Untitled Configuration No.1, a plethora of visual imagery collects on a segmented shelf, pointing to how we are bombarded with a constant stream of data that is often disconnected and difficult to process, yet remains on hand. In contrast, Untitled Configuration No.2, eleven framed photographs form a sequential whole, suggesting a sense of relative cohesion and continuity. By dialectically opposing these two configurations, the work explores tensions between order and disorder, fantasy and the real, the miniature and the large, and fragmentation and unification—all amidst the search for meaning in our temporally challenged world.
Through this project, I look with a self-referential lens at how the act of mirroring another’s obsession takes on a form of collecting, of bringing order from chaos. By coupling myself with collectors–each represented in its collection of coded photographs–I analyze how obsession has the power to organize a collection with the intent to control the experience of time.
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